Such candid emotions
They bite at your skin
Nipping and teasing out the truth
Un-gentle persuasions
So close to true pain
That know the answers before they are given
Shaking out falsities
Like a dog with a bone
Whose teeth will never blunt
And eyes never tire
But the last laugh is yours
As the agony of withdrawal builds
For the simple reality is this
They could’ve just asked
Beneath the veneer, the sparkling wit and quaffed hair lay the remnants of a soul in despair; it was his eyes that gave him away. They were lost. He would always be lost.
I pitied him then, turned away with the broadest back. And though he spat venom, riled and roared, it missed on all accounts. So weak!
I left him to his collected friends and so-called compatriots like grapes on the vine missed in the picking. Worthless, a vintage fit only for insects, he’d rot into the soil without ever knowing what it was to taste champagne.
They attacked with banging guns and booming rockets, an unnecessary commotion, striking as though we were leaves on an autumn tree awaiting winter winds. Perhaps we were in our russet way?
Fall, some called it, the time when one generation made room for the next. Whether or not the giant oak wished it, all it had nurtured, its beloved children, were expunged.
We fell tumbling to the ground in swamped screams. They heard us though. Everyone heard us. And like the tree that bore us, our country, we’d be reborn. For leaves die in silence but their rustling echoes forever.
Two years! Two years of drinking more coffee than a whole family of cocoa bean addicts. That’s what it felt like, anyway. And I preferred tea. Would I have done it all again? Damn right! When I asked the barista out? She just raised an eyebrow. Still, wasn’t a no.
When she laughed, the world laughed with her. When she smiled, the world smiled, too. A bundle of happiness wrapped with a bow, or, at least, auburn pigtails, she stole our hearts and captured our souls. We called her Lucrezia. History would remember her for reasons other than our own.
There are shadows, they lay in strips like a black, trellis fence at acute angles to the world and all it contains. They simmer like sardines in a pan stinking up the place without any thought for others. But they are the others? I’m the odd one out. Thank God!
Everyone had an opinion without knowing what they gave an opinion on. A cacophony of the uneducated, those with the loudest voices fought to be heard above others of their kind, the quieter majority engulfed. I thought them clam-like, mouths opening and closing under the sea, though clams seemed smarter.
