Blackberry solar & Blackberrying

This poem was originally written for the following prompt by Rattle:

Pick a single word at random from the dictionary and use that as the title of a poem in which someone gets their hands dirty.

The word that I picked was “blackberry”, and the poem was heavily inspired by “Blackberrying” by Sylvia Plath and the blue and red pills in the movie, the Matrix.

Blackberry Solar

My tear color, blue-red red.
The same color as blackberry blood.
Muddying your hands.

I could tell it was his,
His hands, shoveling his way through the garden
Of our dreams our mansion. We liked it in our

Dreams. No one could touch. When you befriend
Your delusions you become untouchable. Monstrous.
Monsters in friend costumes. Costumes monstrous.

Burying an old self with the help of your new.
Shadow. I feel like a widow looking out the window.
You made us pick all those blackberries with our bare hands

The same hands you touched another with those blue-red
Marks. The blood of blackberries
If my tear had a color, it would be.

This message is deleted.
This message is deleted.
I have difficulty editing my memory. Everywhere I go

With eyes wide shut, I reach your fossil.
I would be happy to make you something.
Drink a this ink some honest literature in drunk would suit you.

Or you may prefer
Something more metallic, acidic or melodic
Accompanying our nothing, with our hands

Dancing in the blue-red ink of blackberries
To reach each other only to discover solitude as
Wide as the universe. So immense this void within.

Congratulations on becoming a
Blackhole. You want to swallow me whole.
I shouldn’t have let your hands get dirty with no parole.

I shouldn’t have let you eat the beautiful painting of
Berries. All those blue-red juice you extracted
From the life of a blackberry turned dead,

With bare hands a life calculated and bland
They are now resting in piece alongside
The shards of my heart-shaped organ. Separated

From my body and still pumping blood relentless. I always wanted
To fit in within the image of our massacre born out of
A dawn moaning in another language called silence

So we only hear the seagulls make the ripples.
Your hands were immortal monsters touching my
Heart pieces, getting all her ink rain in music at festival

Glastonbury—
At dawn you made your laughter sing an evil hiss
I remembered the moment I thought I was his

I let the moment hiss something in serpentine
To help me swim in poison in bliss within a kiss
A red hole black. This darkness is shining

Brighter than the solar eclipse without
Sunglasses. Something rotten takes me by
The heart I wear on my sleeve like an innocent

Eve tricked into making it in heaven I was eating
Your fruit cruel, making hellish love my home.
Eaten rotten blackberries all morning of my twenties.