You can count me out. I'm over it. Through with you, done with everything....That's a lie. Count me in, it's about time, right? Six years is long enough to be apart. I've waited for this; you, maybe not. Either way, the date's approaching. Count me out, though, it might be a bad decision. No...count me in, I can't wait to see you. Remember that summer? Remember that WINTER? No, no, I can't see you, count me out. Count me in, count me out, I can't decide one way or the other. No, for sure, count me in, what am I...
The body is the lie. The woman who speaks to you face-to-face
with a carefully controlled flex of muscles around the eyes
and the upward curve of just one side of her mouth
that tells you "I'm amused at whatevever joke you just told"
The polite look of interest that cleverly morphs into concern
with a downward press of eyebrows
and a slight lean forward accompanied by a sympathetic noise
they are all walls that look like doors
You would know it for the avatar it is
if you realized she never reaches out a hand,
never bridges that social...
.. 2080 ... 2090 ... 2100. 2100 NE Swenson Avenue, that was the address. Harold was certain of it. He could almost feel an unnatural attraction to the simple white door with blue finish that innocently faced the street, surrounded by colorful flower pots.
A hesitant step after another, his heart pounding, he approached it. His thoughts were hundreds of miles away, in his home country, where his family was held hostage. They were watching his every move, listening to his every breath. If he failed, his wife and children would die.
His hand rested on the doorknob. The windows...
Heating nothing as I refrigerate.
Eating nothing as my body preserves.
We eat and are ultimately eaten.
Preheated, chilled and given to grubs.
We are products for sightless feeders.
Put a tag on me and ship me in a box.
Deliver me to the earth, to be opened up.
Reclined, collapsed, softened and served.
This oven of nothing is heated anyway.
I stare at the flames to assert my intention.
I am alive for now. For now.
All I could do was stare down at the text book and pretend that I was listening to the class going on around me. I just wanted to be free again. I flicked between the pages and the past documented in the battered book. I wonder if when those sailors set out that they even thought for a glimmer of a second that their whole adventure would be covered by a short paragraph in a 10th grade history book and a photo that barely even grasped what their lives were like and how tragic that journey was. I knew that...
The birds had not come in last night and now they would be lost.
Common birds! She spat twirling a small gold spoon in her coffee clattering nervously on the edge of the doll like cup.
So long years of sorrow, so long back breaking toil. The training, the binding of tiny claws the midnight dropper feedings. All of it for nothing. Now they would peck at trash and pretend to get excited when they heard the fog horns of a garbage trawl.
Why do I bother? She picked a tiny scar at the corner of her mouth and drank...
Idyllic farmhouse? Well, appearances can be deceiving, I suppose. If the For Sale sign in front had said, "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here," we might have been more wary. As things stood,, when we signed on the dotted line we had no idea what we were really buying into... or signing away. The funny thing about souls, you don't really notice them until they're gone.
He likes his own room, but he likes mine more. He's five. Half the time, if he had his way he would climb back inside me. He can never get close enough. Half the time. The other half he's complaining. Scowling. "You're interfering with my personal space!" Like he's breaking up with me.
So when he stands there, waiting, in the corner, and he asks if he can share our room, our bed, our space, I do what any rational human would do. And that's to pick him up and hold him, smell his head, that getting-bigger head, and say,...
"Tis a penny," said he, and bent to retrieve the copper coin from the sidewalk. Holding it between gloved finger and thumb, he inspected the date with a squinting eye and dropped it into his vest pocket.
"Aye, twy twirrly twee, a penny's enough fer you an' me," he sang and performed a pirouette for the passerby.
A woman, richly attired and ambling along with an aristocratic gate, stopped to consider the man as he continued to spin in circles. A member of the upper crust, she lacked that innate mechanism, honed by the lower classes, which steered one away...
"Well, if you don't feel like telling me her name, at least tell me what she looks like."
She's perfect. Skin as unblemished as the first snow fall, dark blue eyes that always dance when she sees me, brown hair that shines in the moonlight when we meet in the garden behind her house. Her voice is smooth, young, and playful and I love her. But if they knew who she was... Who knows what they'd do if they knew that the one I love is a Capulet? I'm Romeo, for goodness sake! The son of Lord Montague, enemy of...