Night Thoughts: Scheherazade

How many songs until he sleeps? Feigning joy I pour words over him, Watch his face dissolve in dim evening glass his body lose its lines in the intricate calligraphies that mark the edges of his empire. At the borders I will hang his name beside the morning star and hope to hide myself behind the maze-path of the temple tiles, And shadows cast by sleeping servants, and illegitimate children of his previous campaigns. I think, “Turn your eyes”— turn them inwards once and I will fall away through lamp light carpet weave spiral stair tower door or another’s broken song, whose thread I’ll catch at dawn and knot into a rope