grave letters ✓

17

tonight something strange lingers in the air. the half-lit cigarette butts no longer adorn gone grey parking lots, the corpse no longer sings broken pleas in unremembered gardens of remembrance.

i'm sitting on the dock downtown and the silence for once doesn't feel so silent, the lights flicker along the horizon line, and yet it brings no sort of turmoil to my pacified heart.

after-sunset and twilight at its finest- yet the carnivals are chained up and this time the absence of deafening children and the stink of sweat and cotton candy is not exactly gratifying.

see, the front doors are locked shut and the neighborhood had taken an early train to slumber town yet the dollar store lightbulbs shiver through the blinds that fail to blind a pair of curious eyes.

time-stamp: 19:07, march 23rd of the year 98'- today marks 365 days since a regular church member of this town returned home after a generous offering only to find her son hanging from a gold-floral-coated fan in the third room to the left of a home she had spent twenty-three years building with hot plates and only the purest of love.

the town mourned, not for you- but for your mother.

your body if to be looked as a euphemism for suicide and mentally disturbed, you were a blank canvas at the start of year 97' that slowly pervaded with wounds upon your waist only in the finest shades of sanguine, your lips drained from all its colors because sometimes beauty goes far beyond peaches and oranges. the light leaked from in between your ribs that was stripped bare by mama's kitchen knife-

how many times had she chopped fresh carrots out of her green garden with it and fed them to you with her own hands?

you ungrateful little fuck.

you strike a match and kiss the crevices upon your skin as though you were a bloody star and you were meant to burn bright. you were nothing but the ashes of it, yet you were too narcissistic to believe that you were anything less of the picture-perfect little town golden boy you had painted inside your mind.

your wrist that your mother painted in early-spring-flowers, you decided it would be your new playground. why? were the pixie-dust bags and white picket fences not good enough of a childhood for you? were the monthly visits from tooth-fairy and the thousand-dollar christmas presents from santa too far-fetched for your seven-year-old mind?

questions are abundant behind the many doors nailed to the walls of my mind.

if out-of-body experiences were true, you'd stand on the other side of the street and look upon this killing ground and hear no lamentation from a soul other than the poor woman you abandoned in a mansion too large to be occupied by a single woman in her early fifties.

bathed in sweet lemonade promises, tenderness upon your skin from the moment she laid her hopeful eyes on you- your lips on her breast and your hands upon her heart; how could you possibly salvage what remained from the dismantled tracks you left behind.

you were never one to take on responsibilities anyway.

now she sits by the train station every evening with crescents drawn in the corners of her eyes and bouquets of primroses in her butterscotch hands- waiting to fetch a child that never got on the bloody train in the first place.

you drove her insane- just like you did to yourself.