cigarette smoke.

strawberry-syrup

"HAVE SOME COMPOSURE, WHERE IS YOUR POSTURE?"

iii.

you're holding to the shrapnel of a loose bullet shell. red stains your fingers a sickly color: red like strawberry syrup. you hate the stuff; it sticks and it burns the back of your throat. you barely blink at the limp figure of limbs entangled in front of your eyes. the thumping of your chest has stopped and the blood on your hands is from your fingertips―you turn around the block. the rooms spin, so you left the blank white. the intimacy of sharing all you have with the adults that staple hate to your charred soul. you stare at them dead-eyed when they tell you that you are a young god in the making. they lie to please themselves; so you lie back. sharp teeth and rainy days, you are of girls in white dresses and children drunk on friendship. sleeping on a bed of nails and crosses as the men and women around you tell you to do the work of god, 

on your knees, they say.

you bend down and pray before a being you have never known as gold stains through colored windows; a halo spins around your white locks - purple eyes looking up. you can hardly differ the iris from the pupil -- blown wide and unstable. if you are an angel, where are your wings? you ask them and they have no answer ― 

you are a messenger of the gods, they say.

you look them in their prideful eyes and you want to spit on their shoes - but you do not. too difficult, you tell yourself. it becomes harder and harder day in and day out to tell the blue-purple stains under your eyes from your lavender irises ― or maybe you're becooming delusional with the loss of sleep.

they believe you to be an angel -- fallen from the ranks of heaven where archangel gabriel cut your wings and cast you  from heaven in the body of a child; to represent new beginnings, they say.

when you burn down the chapel you think you have found catharsis, need not heaven let you through it's pearly gates and picket fences. you think and you look down to your bloody fingers - strawberry syrup lines your tongue and you choke out a laugh.

no, i am something close to human, but not quite. mayhaps the devil will know. you whisper to the ashes. it smells like a crematorium. you are of bloodstained white-roses and lie-soaked lips; dressed in burns from the devils word ― and your smile. it's not a pretty smile - they taught you how to smile prettily, with your pink-pink-pink painted lips and your loose curved eyes and your begging hands. 

you run to a land of mildew and summers - of long winters and too hot summers where there is not enough food and not enough time. you tell them stories of a chapel you burned to cinders ― tha you set aflame with the gasoline on your tongue and the matches on your lips. you tell them of cobblestone floors and strawberry-syrup hands. 

they laugh with you and your stories and you tell them that you have fallen from grace ― and then you do. plaster holds your bones under the ashes ( six feet deep ) as you stand before red, red, red and ask it what you are.

it says you are something that has broken bones and bloodied teeth. that you are of estrogen-boys and testosterone-girls and jack-rabbit hearts that stop upon deaths door; all you can do is smile. strawberry syrup scratches the back of your throat.