shaded but lingering.

Shades over my eyes, my eyes are disappearing into the flaming floor. Where are they going? I am wondering lamely, as I watch Golden Eyes walking into the sunset, being swalled up into Forever Forest. I wonder now if there is anything to make those eyes of solid gold turn around and start running but I can’t think of any particular reason I would want that so I shrug and follow my eyes once more. We journey along a ruby covered road. The rubies glint at me, daring me to challenge their senseless glow and I am about to when I feel it. Soft prickly rain. The kind that makes you wish you had worn something with a hood to calm the hairs on the back of your neck, tell them to stop standing quite so tall. The rain takes me by surprise but it is such a relieving surprise because it shoots down my guard like an empty backpack does to a full stomach. You can never be too sure where you’re really going, but I stare into an empty purple wall and think of those two beautiful blue candles anyway and take off upwards. I’m soaring, shoulders spread like a morning stretch waiting for the sign that it’s starting. But I am just waiting, waiting, waiting and to pass the SK waiting game time, I part my lips for a cigarette and close them tightly, unable to wait for the next breath to fill my lungs to capacity, the way those fire engulfed blue candles burn my dreams and turn them to ash. In the flame of my fire I can see the candles’ cousins, nieces and nephews…which will never be quite as great but great in a gentler way that I know I can keep up with. I have trouble keeping with grace placed before me, following it through x-rays that show perfect bones and ballet excercises that will increase the flex in the grace. I cannot see this for what it is only for how loud and long it echoes in the back of my head and how heavily it weighs on my conscience that I have treated you so badly. And equality lessens nothing, just gains strength against me, resisting seamlessly, trickling through porous quilts stitched from a pathwork of lost love and the inevitability that it will bite again. Your happiness will never pay for your love, only sacrifice words and lung contractions for something as impure and immoral as a ruby encrusted road. Your tears are metaphoric and they will drown you as the Titanic drowned its own propellers. The sounds of hollow hearts are not meant to be heard but hidden on one of the two paths you must ride down. The mirror of the stars is huge and I am as tiny as the sand on last 4th of July’s beach towel that no one will ever find because I am too small to matter to such an incredibly exquisite mirror. But I don’t like this and before I can reason with my hand it time travels in light years upwards and shatters the glass and the heart of the mirror, so tall and telling. The glass and hearts shards fall into my eyes and I wave goodbye to the once beautiful expanse that has become nothing in my eyes and I know in this frozen second that I will never change. I see a swimmer, smooth capped, slick limbed, diving divinely through the waters of cold innocence, looking for some sort of treasure so I hope and hope and hope and hope and cross myself quickly for luck. Time, time, time is coming back and I rush into the tunnel that will take me to present time, a safety net of sorts that scratches at my sheets and pulls at my necklace while I sleep soundlessly, reliving what I hope I didn’t just observe.

-lbr