Shadows

This is not how I meant it to be.
This is not who I meant to become.
These are not the memories I
expected to replay in my
head as I remembered who
I once had been.

Escape

Here in this leaving
triumph is fleeting
from so far away
no tongues left to speak in

Hiding

They found it, separately.  Sometimes one at a time, sometimes in small groups.  They all instinctively shied away from each other, accepted without argument that certain hallways would remain locked to them.  What did they want to see each other for, anyway?  They didn’t.  They didn’t, and they wouldn’t.

Once they had all arrived and found themselves their own shadowy corners, the teenage boy appeared.  He went to a courtyard in the middle, surrounded on all sides by brick walls with windows that opened from the inside.  On a white sheet spread out on the concrete ground he very deliberately started placing red plastic drinking straws.  No one watched him and he paid attention to no one else.

Over time the straws began to form an intricate pattern.  Those hiding in the brick building did not want to look at it, and when they did, they pretended not to understand.  Was it a formula, they asked?  The kind you needed to be a math genius to understand, perhaps?  They were not math geniuses, so they would never understand it.  Satisfied, they slid away from the windows. 

But the group of pirate boys living in the trees overhead did not leave.  They watched from the tree house they built high in the branches.  They knew what the red straws on the white sheet meant.  They knew it was a key.  A key to a map that would lead everyone in the building to the one place no one wanted to go. 

No one, that is, but them.

One more night

burned across my heart your forgotten message

the language lost in time with the words rewritten

resuscitate the girl she is out of breathing

collapsed under the hope she could not believe in

the soot was in her eyes she could only cry

was this my one great truth

            did I give up    

too soon?

Another bad day

So you did it, and I'm not dead.
I'm not paralyzed, maimed, 
I have a life.
And, knowing who you are, I
can tell you to kiss off
without much reason for guilt.
But it is who I am,
It is what you have made me.
It is ugly way down here,
and the ugliness smells like you.

This one flower

Stunned, hurt, and on the verge of tears, Josie stared at the spot where the King had just been standing.  She had known it was impossible—that she could never stay in the Interior, and that he would never cross over.  Neither of them would have dared ask the other to make such a huge sacrifice.  But at the same time she’d told herself that, although they couldn't truly be together, she would at least be able to see him sometimes.  That he would just completely disappear from her life—she hadn't considered that possibility for a moment.  Not after everything they’d been through together.  His impersonal thanks on behalf of his people…she never would have believed it would end like that. 

And yet it had.

Regrets

When all aboard ride the night train alone

mark the passing of the time with the

falling of the

snow

No use in unpacking for tomorrow    

tomorrow is a thousand midnight

dreams of summer

away.