the space above my ears.

The Meadows Below

So we meet,

Two wastes of time,

Of space,

Of precious breaths.

I could say a trillion things, but they'd all have the same effect on you so I will say nothing.

Even with our young fingers interlocked and unbreakable on a day which is just another tired and worried tally mark, the air where our skin meets buzzes with reassurance.

It will have been nothing but a burden exchange come the morning, as we are so blissfully unaware.

Counterproductive because both of our handicaps are molded to our own backs, therefore mine weighs too heavy on your lower spine and yours pokes me uncomfortably between the shoulder blades.

We can only fix ourselves, so says the sword, and then nothing, nothing but the whistle of the wind.

Grey skies, faces far too drained to express agony, the view of the castle crumbling, bowing in surrender.

An orange sauce drizzled on the salad which once rested atop the royal dining table, shining in artificial candlelight, citrus-flavored and sweet.

A lonely witch directing the orchestra of endings, head twisted to a 180 degree angle just to keep screaming back at the monkeys.

Just to keep those iron reins tight around their necks, just enough to knock another piece of self-preservation off the board,

Make them kill themselves for her succession, or, should things turn out badly, die alongside her.

Spare her the embarrassment of being the first and only to die.

I'm finishing these stories, tying up the loose pieces.

Haphazard, uncouth, scraggly, but tied up nonetheless.

No, not nonetheless,

Lesstheless.

Really, I'm just trying to make a surprise for myself tomorrow like no one ever does.

An easter egg in my bowl of blueberry oatmeal.

I'm trying to surprise myself with the language of service acts, take a little off my plate for myself tomorrow.

It's junk and it's useless, but it's an ending.

Lesstheless.

Think about what it's like to be me, just for a minute.

Blood pounding in your shoulders, throbbing like second hearts.

Having to squeeze your eyes shut when you think of older things you wrote.

Constantly asking yourself, will I reach a point where the revelation is less than what I made this morning at the poolside in the beaming sun?

Phoenix wings, hands for feathers, eyeless, ancient.

Attending the wedding but with the unshakeable feeling that it's only a hallucination and you're really out here in the forest alone,

the tree canopy swallowing you up into its depths instead of casting a fresh, green glow.

And the sad pink bunny in the attic of a wallpaper house, soggy and peeling and molding.

Big, dangerous eyes streaming rust from their corners down the soft cheeks of its face.

Does anything have value when it fails the test of memory?

A genuine question, if you could do anything in the world but forget it the next day, would you even go through the trouble?

Paris, a balcony, the deliciously bitter scent of euphoria in the air, you take a drag from the wrap between your lips and tilt your head back, the tendons of your neck and bones of your jaw moving like water under your skin

Blood red lipstick, pale demeanor.

I'm trying to make you feel a thing I have been feeling recently; blue and orange and bright streetlights in the brown sky.

Foreign and terrifying, you find yourself breathless.

A sorry excuse for an army stands, ungraded, unnamed, incomplete; so insightfully described, yet sporting an inadequacy beyond any perceivable limit multiplied tenfold.

Locked and loaded, stumbling from the sheer weight of their weapons.

A 14 karat gold baseball bat.

Maces line with glimmering silver.

Silken rose-petal pink nooses of the finest quality, every thread methodically woven into that meticulous fabric.

The conjuring of something so infinitely deep, something many meters beneath the stone well sagging against the unkempt dry brush in the back gardens, filling with blood, urine, marrow.

Rotting, festering, housing vermin bigger than God, bigger than this lost parallel universe.

Bigger than our meager, mortal eyes can perceive.

So many unfelt emotions just penciled in, blank and weak, disguised without effort, moth-eaten.

Herein lies the conundrum we know as accountability.

It's impartial, uncaring, just another system of measuring worth.

A skill in which I am only good for illustrating halfway-hypothetical scenarios in a stealthy, but oxymoronically exaggerated fashion,

Making hours of gazing at a plain popcorn ceiling interesting, bold, tragic, passionate, nauseating, infuriating, surreal, euphoric, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.

For that, I'm deemed superior, albeit privately.

Many things will never emerge from the sea of TV static perpetually buzzing in a very vague state of my consciousness.

However, I know very well that you are quite capable of lying to yourself and even more capable of believing it.

I'm not antagonizing you.

I do the same thing, just slightly more tastefully.

Some do it with so much vigor, so recklessly that they find their own heads safer than religion.

I think they have every right to it; daydreaming, that is.

It's one's personal decision whether they let it ruin them the same way dementia ruins the memory. 

First, you forget things, then you forget people, and eventually, you forget yourself.

But that's okay, as long as it lets you keep on loving the idea of love from a distance.

Anything to keep you from fearing your own fear, keep those eyes alight and alive under that popcorn ceiling.

Anything to stay afloat.