Over and over,
dry skin flakes off my shoulders,
crumbs of a younger me,
revealing new layers that nobody
has seen.
I watch the girl in the mirror watch
back. We do not know each
other and, I think, we never will.
The bells began to spin without chime. I noticed them
long before her blue hair reached out beyond arms length;
azure fire serpents striking!
The bells twirled and whirled, and I noticed them
before her coiled locks hissed at a lush, worked field.
She had been a craving. Jellied breasts flopping
under moon beams,
underneath heavy breath sheets.
There is nothing like a beat red short bed,
the first bit of skin stretched,
meeting dropped blood-lets by a first night sunrise.
She was a place of blue bells,
lemonade peels,
sleepy grass on lazy jazz fields.
Her mind marked with umbrella lace covering May days.
She was marked by a farm boy first night.
I watched her as she carried the bells.
Big steel bells, pretty stainless chimes. She danced with them,
her long, gold locks wrapped in a warm embrace around them.
She chimed. She jingled with southern foliage while
her feet remembered his.
That’s when the bells began to spin. They twirled and swirled
and she didn’t notice them. She was wrapped in a warm night
with another’s appetite. She was cuddling with the crickets and
midnight winds.
On and on and on this went.
Forever couldn’t measure the time. The sun had went blind.
The moon sweat itself dry.
I watched and realized just how thin my own breasts were,
and I was grateful.
For one day came when she noticed the silence of the bells,
she recognized the twists,
and the turns,
and the absence of the crickets and midnight and feet.
Shock came at her, a black bat of attack. Her golden strands
suffocated, turning as blue as that cold moment.
And there she became.
She stood with force against the night fields,
Miss Serpentine, on fire,
blazing lush, worked fields back at Mister Red Short Bed and
her overstretched skin!
I entered her
last night. Through parted limbs, then
parted.
Forehead.
Chest.
Hard back books watching.
We wrote a story for them.
I told her that I never saw them
read. The ancient people.
I bore holes in their heads while
they
bailed strong hay fields
and
branded our hamburger.
They could remove sexual organs
by blood asphyxiation,
dry fruit in plastic air,
grow meat in sloppy hog mud,
they did it.
They did everything with books
but listen to their stories.
She came down from composition.
Pink panties, black casual,
laughing
about my pork fields and grease.
One day, we will be ancient. Will the books
remember us?
Will we be decorated in hard backs?
We laid, backs hard on thin, white sheets.
Skinny lips impressing lit
cigarettes, kissed wet from
brick liquid.
We drank for the moon we remembered.
The pale one that danced with
us
before we lost the Others.
The brunettes.
The scrappers.
The pretty little foster kids.
5am lost the luster. So, we stopped.
I chose blue for my tears, and left.
She chose white sheets
sprinkled with biography.
Rid these monsters of reflection.
Mirrors are vomiting
bleach blonde
bitches.
Pretty, vapid
chlorine
burns evidence of authenticity.
Keep their unsightly roots away!
I have grown my garden of
validity
over years of exiguous soil. Chemicals
will kill me.
Lost? Indeed! On every climate,
heads over porcelain, hoping
to
heave in that enamel gloss,
they export
beauty with unique finger tips;
to be a reflection
of another one,
somewhere!
I held her hand as we ran
through the parking lot. The dirty snow clumped
against the sidewalk ditch and people clumped
together as they walked toward the
store.
She is youthful in ways that I do
not remember anymore. Almost as if she doesn’t
know any better, she lets me lead her
across the asphalt
to an old, decrepit truck.
An old man sits inside with the
engine running. He knows a secret and
I just want to make sure he knows
it.
The girl smiles. She is intrigued with the mystery
of where these footsteps might take her. We turn around
and skip back to the store. I just want to take her.
maggiemaeijustsaythis 