the space above my ears.

Portal to Soul

A ballerina walks along the rim of a jack-in-the-box.

Slandering.

She's waiting for Jack to invite her inside, but he is sleeping.

She doesn't know this.

Her friend, the nutcracker, is waiting so patiently on the carpet, holding her bag and her extra pair of slippers.

His painted eyes are a lightless green, reflecting the image of the dancer in denial.

He waits, he always waits, but among the bits of peanut shell trapped in his jaw, he has a confession that has been left unspoken thus far.

Slandering.

He is not a messiah.

He doesn't know this.

Jack is in his box, of course, comatose as ever.

He avoids things that make noise, even the gentle ones.

He talks sometimes, but he is rarely heard by anyone outside the paintings of inside-out jellyfish decorating his home.

He opened the box once and he will not do it again.

He, in fact, wishes he never did.

Never opened himself.

Slandering.

People are waiting for him, holding out lanterns in the dusk

He doesn't know this.

We are above things such as this, above the affairs of children's toys stuffed hastily under a twin-sized bed.

As the crank moves counterclockwise for the third hour, though, I remember our vows to each other.

I promised I would manifest days for you.

Manifest a life that wasn't so splintered, that wasn't so bent up.

I am partially to blame, but I swear I never hurt you on purpose.

I'm so sorry I fell asleep on the phone.

He, you, will say it's alright and I'll say it's not because I told him, you, with no questions that he, you, could tell me the good and bad episodes of his, your, days and nights.

And I was going to tell him, you, about the fairy funeral and the fold out chairs, the 2x1 inch coffin.

The eulogies composed of fraud references.

They alluded to our time on the islands once.

One time.

They didn't even mention the teeth in the sand or from the sky. 

Peach-flavored days didn't mean to them what they did to us.

And so now it's all in present tense, not the past like it should be.

Now the mornings are slipping through our fingers.

Now, "I love you" is a threat.

You thought it made you powerful, the beauty in your hands and the popsicle stick homes you built.

I let you lie, left your cities to rot.

And in the failure of hindsight, the missing remorse, it is revealed what I took from you.

What the nutcracker took from Jack.

Faith.