If by Michael Lee Lyrics

If pain had a color
if that color could move
through the bones
like a crack of heat scrubbing
the marrow clean
if we could undress
from the inside if pain made a noise
if pain might bloom
if breath thickened by Winter
peels open the night
like an eyelid or dead
fruit if ice like fire also
burns down against the skin
if pain had a color or shape
if the moon were another
planet’s sick shadow
if the bodies were freed
from sight and seeing
and sound and the soul
if the soul were a lit wick
if it vanished if a storm
of Trumpeter Swans unraveled
from a frozen lake and a bullet
sang through the reeds if pain
were an endless row of keys
if pain had a logic
or if logic did if Winter would give
way to Winter a key hole drilled
into the lake at night
dark waters staring back
into our own dark if a telescope
stares inside another telescope
if a single pupil devours the iris
if a black moon is discovered
inside each of our cells if we lived
in a kingdom of silence
if an aria were to rise splitting open
the boreal dark which darkens
beneath itself if pain a gate
if pain a lake frozen solid
saves its cyclopean eye
widening if sight begets
sight if eyes open across the body
if pain a sheet of paper incised
one stroke at a time
if fistfulls of night removed
like black hair from a drain
if each letter a wound
if we are all two people
as we sleep we are awake
in another body if that bodies dies
if we never sleep again
if we begin to hear our names
chanted by someone who is not there
if I still feel the boy
inside me like a hunger
if each letter on the page
is a speck of his blood
across snow if each letter here could open
if we might crawl inside one now
if each vowel might be a mouth
of a cave overlooking a new world
if we might dangle our feet over the edge
if pain endless like snow or the sky
from which it was torn if night
if oh if anything if
anything else let me enter
even a single letter and sleep