She was talking again,
talking.
The words just lolled off of her tongue like a still born infant out of the womb,
all pretentious and gory- like what someone might write a song after or tattoo on their arm to appear to be-
to be.
To snag someone’s attention.
“See how much I want you to look me in the eyes. Please, look me in the eyes.”

Sweat and sweet tears mingled
but what can a person with no tongue add?
Cliche’s ; there were too many.
Smiles blew a hole through the atmosphere- you can see sun particles leaking in.
Burn your retinas.

But the ferocity of the event

how she put her old fishing hat on the rack and claimed the bass had stolen her dignity and pride...when really, the lure was resting at the bottom of the lake, along with a crystalline spherical of some oddly ruptured heart.

Something fragile and glass-like.
Like the old tree ornament that cracked on the front lawn
“I’m sorry daddy.”

Her ballerina shoes she threw down the stairs.

“They make my toes bleed!”

Yet you trample a bed of hot coals every time you sidle up to that tree and carve out your dreams.
You don’t mind the festering blisters if you don’t see the pustules behind them.

Everything heals.



“C for Cassidy and B for Blaine.”

But didn’t you hear?
Cassidy, did you see?
They cut down the old tuskus years ago
and made a retirement home out of the remains-

where you and I can grow old together.

But no longer will we hold each other- that part died with simpering bark shards that glazed across old William’s face

“I am beautiful, maybe now I am complete.”
There was some poisoning in that wood, or maybe it was there all along- the bleeding pores of his being just aired it out.
Ventilated the feeling.
He always did like the swings on Mosyfled Hill- so he died with them lassoed about his neck.
What a twig.
It must have snapped in half on the first bite of the cords.
They twine around his hands beneath the ground like sacred snakes that bore him across the Styx.

I love the way he used to talk.

“We are so simple. So simple we could never look to ourselves and Say ‘hey, this is me, this is why I’m here’”

So simple it drove him all the way from here to the Questral homes.
He’ll ferment quietly for now- he has all the time in the world.
Those snakes may be licking his bones by the time the Lord comes again.

It’s over.

Like a super novelic theme into the “WILD BLUE YONDER”
or so he screamed as he ran out of his house, tears streaking madly down his face like shrapnel littering the field of a bygone area- The Veterans may tell you exactly how it looked

“Like I put a cat in the microwave and it popped, but it was my brother instead...my comrade. He had blue eyes. Oh, God, did he have blue eyes...”

ZINGING through the air like a mesh of Hollanders brambles caught in your hair.
Where I pulled them out and your tresses came with them.

So your scalp bled and it leaked through your eyes.
Don’t smear your mascara for me, darling, just remember the swing.

The same swing that hung him- we sat on.

Think of all the chaos such a pairing would cause.

Think of that world of pretend we’d fly to, while destroying this one.
It’s not worth is Cassidy-

Bernadette won’t allow it.

She won’t allow my swallow to croak. Only the toad has that privilege.

When you scream “Yes! Please!” pleading at her all the while, her eyes will take on that melancholy tint and she’ll yield.
“Dearest Cassidy, I do indeed wish you death.”
That’ll weigh down your heart as you sink through the mud and out on the other side of the planet, where gravity was never issued.
Away, away into some aeronautical field upon the vast moon.
You’ll sit and watch the fox fires from there and sigh.

“Sometimes I wish I had never been born.”

And by then, you’ll be defeated.

Bernadette always wins.
She was born with it.

“I always wondered how to make someone, but I guess the opposite of that will have to suffice.”

Trying to make you out of scented oils and graceful stitches on the loom.
Your’s, all your’s.

“I don’t belong to you.”

You can whisper that to the moon as you sit upon his face and whirl about like a delirious leper.

“I don’t belong.”

Just making a human, tear drop by tear drop.