I cared about all these people very much at one stage.
I knew a boy with soft brown eyes
And a heart hewn out of crumbled gingerbread
Soft and silly and sweet and sad
With a crumbling mind, all raw like gingerbread
Selfish and spineless with childish opinions
Like half-cooked dough baked gooey in his skull;
It wasn't his fault. He'd tried very hard.
But his spice was dulled with flour
like gingerbread.
I knew a girl with a face like the moon
Skin like milk in a moon-lit bowl
Hair like wax when she flattened it back
Like a white dawn spilling from her shoulders through the halls
Sisterhood and mystery, secret smiles in history
("I'll be your Erasmus if you'll be my Thomas Moore - ")
My cold white fox
Whose breath was hot
And stung with blood leaking streaky down her maw.
I knew a lady all twisted and stunted
Woman crammed down in the shell of a girl
Grinding and cracking her teeth till they shattered
Bursting capillaries, fracturing pearls
Then shoving the pieces like glass down her gullet
To carve up her guts with a guilt that she craved
"A noble defeat," I'd told her once, laughing,
"I'd lose in a heartbeat if you could be saved."
She hated her skin. She hated the coating
of memory's strata that clung to her veins
So she sloughed it all off;
Spiralled red down the shower
The pulp of my heartstrings was caught in the drain.