m

Young for decades in my time.  Ice-walking, window-staring, blanket-gathering.

Cut for wool across lap and chest.  Watch a world; chatter out a living character.

Tap, murmur.  Draw shades.  Cell closed.

Wear robes.  White hair.  Follow halls, stairs, brandy, flame.  Taxidermies haunt.  Am comfortably old.  Younger all the time. Tired.

It’s been a pleasure

You look so young, she said and snakes rolled over the table, tree branches in shadow as the sun kissed the leaves green to gray to black.  Snakes stretched yearned for found her windows and raked them out saying I Need This! I Need You! And I laughed and said no, you should have seen me yesterday.

She’s not the type for a kiss with onion dome hair and bird foot hands but now I love her, now I’m inside her, now I see her bird foot hands in repose and her knuckles are bleached stony everests cresting secret fleshy valleys and clear glass webs.  Canvas stretched over bone and meat and talon and each impossibly tiny vein.  See her in those: cluster and fiber and freeway at hair’s width, where her grasping digits unfurled and stretched and warped and bled but underneath was never not newborn.

Now I’m making her breakfast: Toast

Now I’m giving her a synthetic diamond.  I think they’re neat.  I try to explain.  She calls it an excuse.

Now we’re bored.  We watch a movie.

Now she’s dead.

She’s asking me what I know about her life but it’s not easy to put those words in my mouth so I make up something about mine.  Watch her bird foot hands fill in a box, tap at a window, scratch in the henyard.   I never took her for the type to take flight.