Dance Macabre

Debdutta Pal & Edward Swafford's poetic collab

ENVY EYES. Image by James Superschoolnews.

No matter how many of my flaunted faces
you put in the ground, sycophant survivalist
typifies woe and mourning with expression
envy
enter here all who wish to know, for tonight,
you’re my closest idol.

Once is a slip, sloping thorough charcoal
now we’re intertwined beyond admission
with nebulous symbols
twice scattered on pillowcases
I transliterate through hours of the wolf
you misinterpreted for illimitable adoration
paving slipstreams for my trapped arsenal.

Anathema to the touch, treasonous terse
eras of wishing and willing my wake
likho in granite casts his blame game
statuesque arabesque mythos makes for
charmed curses as I move to the rhythm
of the vengeance drum.

Step down again in hexagonal sequences
of seasons varnished with incessant rain
drops that restyled my veins into roots
rapidly manifesting, affixing
in irrevocable molded ornamentation
to paralyzed limbs respiring new life cells
ionized with immanent chemical energy.

Stepping and sliding down cyclical
symbolisms of you. Me. The rule
of three, manifest thee and pay
with thrice enkindling of somnambulism
somas of heaven/hell/purgatory OR
an inchoate inferno of me tasting
your lecherous lips.

Choose, for tonight, I’m munificent
sufficient to purchase you prisoner
like you obnubilated my spirit, shackled
for eternities with bendy pigmented claws
stretching my parameters
to ameliorate charred circumferences
until I was remade, over again and again,
stopping, ceasing, when I paralleled you.

In parallel prisms we collide like
colored asterisms licked with an
asterisk to our shared epitaph, a
twilight dusk/dawn fusion of fusillade
empathy guised as apathy so appreciate
the greatest gift of all — my envy eyes.

Time freezes, pixelating into particle dust
storms I conjured in shaded hues of copper
licking horizons silhouetting our arena
you tried to eradicate, calling the final round
ringing carillons for your honorable virtues
venerating your victory etched in stones
until I installed you inside, for my becoming.

© Debdutta Pal & Edward Swafford 2025

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For this poem, Edward and I alternated stanzas, composing four each. I hope you agree with me when I say, we passed the fifth dimension.

Someone pinch me, because I’m dreaming. No wait, don’t wake me up, not yet.

After sipping the Merlot, the first notes to register were, “I want your love, and I want your revenge, you and me could write a bad romance” courtesy
of Lady Gaga. But the more I sat with it, the more concentric circles raised.

Of escaping a complex situation but turning back, for a triumphant round. Of life and death. Of deeper and different realities, to understand our own.

All your interpretations are welcome. Or you could guess who wrote what.

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HER FUTURE. Image by James Superschoolnews.

*Originally published in Know Thyself, Heal Thyself