grave letters ✓

10

in the paper town where we cello taped our ripened apricot hearts onto the seams of engraved treehouses with stolen pennies beneath our copper ears, there was a crooked sign right across the street from the nursery school that cultivated cannabis in schoolgirl's far-fetched mind.

"PLEASE REMOVE YOUR SHOES BEFORE ENTERING!"

so, we run barefoot across the juniper grass in april showers with mosquito bites along the labelled skin of our famished remains. swaying back and forth on ruptured seesaws and painting ourselves blue whilst we ride on the back of paper planes through the currents of our play-act hearts.

you were so dauntless in your kaleidoscopic dreams with the whole of nebulae in the palm of your hands, that every time you flew too high or crashed too hard- the skies spit bubblegum to ground you back to the skinned soils of the earth.

ivory pearls along our moon bones and the clement veneer on snapped ankles- we recited mandarine monologues at the top of our cancerous lungs as declarations of our unruly philia.

the act of being drunk on one's sobriety and juvenile hopes and dreams- time-stamped 11:11 pm. 

patient number 137986 has been clinically diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and handed a prescription for clozapine, 200mg.

anytime now, they would strap my milk ribs with gasoline-soaked shoelaces and pour hot liquor down my skinned throat.

they needed to cement the crumbling concrete of broken pavements along the remote streets of my mind. ignite the shattered cores of the rusting street lamps across the loose seams to guide me through a town i had molded with my own sweat, tears and blood poured to the depths of every crevice along the crenellations sheltering broken families with blunt knives in bleached denim because blood will always be thicker than molten clozapine.

one last rendezvous at blue hour with lemon zest in our crimson-rimmed eyes. had the stolen flower petals endured through one more fatal winter night, perhaps, we could have hopped on to bus thirteen with our salt-soaked maps long forgotten under april showers and the skies at last with open arms.

as tempting as it sounds, we should have known.

paper towns could never last under april showers for long.