Those Mansions in Your Walls

From 'The Diaries of The Titillater,' Entry #251

Those Mansions in Your Walls

the blood in your high walls
poisons my base desires
making me reinfect myself
with what started the foundation
of my longing for you.
I travel through those gnarled veins,
chronic, chaotic passages around the bend
to where I ruled a world I invented
Terrible, Titillating, Totalitarian
to me as infant
then crocodile
tree, chopped down
then ripped into a page
of a script where I read lines for
the hunted, then the hunter,
preyed
then cast
against type, of course,
as predator.

Though I attended schools in mansions
I tended to you like you were all the weeds
of what I learned
about human beings
I branded with inhumanity.
I confess to seeing you as separate from myself.
I'd like to say that now, I am devoted to you
through becoming a devotee of me.
And though your walls grow tall as Redwoods
the ladders I produce should not pick your heart
like a peach.
But I am afraid I will always crave then crush you
for the rush of staring at myself in mirrors
falling in love with the image of my disbelief
and know that diamonds can be derelicts
and derelicts delicious.

by Tiffany Osedra Miller