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Description
Death was semi-deciduous, following you
around like it was lost and you dared to feed it,
crawling with its pincers pinching and its mandibles
laughing;

just how much of your soul did you give It?

you were eight, and you were at
school like the good little girl that you were when you
found the dead bird in the yard. It was a young finch, small as your child-sized palm, like
it had been fitted to the lines of your hands, like this moment was
supposed to happen.
Curiosity picked it up and empathy cradled it in your arms, stroking still feathers
that rustled beneath your fingertips.
Its eyes were still
open, forced to watch the evils of the world, even
having passed from it,

yet they seemed so familiar, like the photographs of a mother who was never there, a mother who'd abandoned you for death. there was sentience in death. there was kinship.

and you just stared and stared, and suddenly, it wasn't
dead anymore, and it stared back.
and its eyes felt your own with a love you've never known. you looked at your hands, unsure where the blood had come from, terrified at what you'd done. death was not meant to be thwarted.

You never told anyone, not until you were
fifteen and the world seemed like it was collapsing with
the stranger's smoke-filled lungs as you cradled his head to your chest on a street and streamed
tears down onto his fire-torn face like heaven's last rain. Not until
desperation poured onto him, desperation for someone else to know your heart
and you whispered to him.
"I wish I could make things right.
That things would be right, and things wouldn't die, and they would live
like I wanted them to."
But, they didn't, and they died in your hands like you were guilty,

even though you did nothing wrong, didn't even know what happened, and were too numb to find out. his is a tarnished memory, all because of you, and so the guilt lives on. you never made him worth it.

and the tears didn't seem to stop, not until you were twenty-three
and too numb to
feel them streaming and weening off the
tips of your nose and chin and neck, and crashing stalacite-like while
you refused to acknowledge the voice chiming your
father's death, who used to swear he'd never die. The woman on the phone
wasn't sad enough; she didn't know about the promises he'd made, and how
he let go of them so easily, pushing them away from death and abandoning
carcasses to you.

death drowns promises in itself, chokes them on its essence and laughs as they decay beside it. promises are trophies to be broken, and nothing more.

You never went to the funeral; lies didn't deserve
your tears, and so you cried at home with the lights
off, and the house dark
so he couldn't see you through the ceiling.

and bitterness washed away every good memory you might have kept as you rubbed them from your eyes, red and raw with salt: it tore at your skin.

Forgiveness only came at thirty-one, when death reached into your spine,
plucking nerves and bone with its spiderling fingers and birthing pain
in a car crash-- you wept in the light when the glass hit
your face like crystal tears and you realized just how close death is

and that maybe you'd wasted all this time in hate,
and that maybe, no one ever means to die.

Description
Death was semi-deciduous, following you
around like it was lost and you dared to feed it,
crawling with its pincers pinching and its mandibles
laughing;

just how much of your soul did you give It?

you were eight, and you were at
school like the good little girl that you were when you
found the dead bird in the yard. It was a young finch, small as your child-sized palm, like
it had been fitted to the lines of your hands, like this moment was
supposed to happen.
Curiosity picked it up and empathy cradled it in your arms, stroking still feathers
that rustled beneath your fingertips.
Its eyes were still
open, forced to watch the evils of the world, even
having passed from it,

yet they seemed so familiar, like the photographs of a mother who was never there, a mother who'd abandoned you for death. there was sentience in death. there was kinship.

and you just stared and stared, and suddenly, it wasn't
dead anymore, and it stared back.
and its eyes felt your own with a love you've never known. you looked at your hands, unsure where the blood had come from, terrified at what you'd done. death was not meant to be thwarted.

You never told anyone, not until you were
fifteen and the world seemed like it was collapsing with
the stranger's smoke-filled lungs as you cradled his head to your chest on a street and streamed
tears down onto his fire-torn face like heaven's last rain. Not until
desperation poured onto him, desperation for someone else to know your heart
and you whispered to him.
"I wish I could make things right.
That things would be right, and things wouldn't die, and they would live
like I wanted them to."
But, they didn't, and they died in your hands like you were guilty,

even though you did nothing wrong, didn't even know what happened, and were too numb to find out. his is a tarnished memory, all because of you, and so the guilt lives on. you never made him worth it.

and the tears didn't seem to stop, not until you were twenty-three
and too numb to
feel them streaming and weening off the
tips of your nose and chin and neck, and crashing stalacite-like while
you refused to acknowledge the voice chiming your
father's death, who used to swear he'd never die. The woman on the phone
wasn't sad enough; she didn't know about the promises he'd made, and how
he let go of them so easily, pushing them away from death and abandoning
carcasses to you.

death drowns promises in itself, chokes them on its essence and laughs as they decay beside it. promises are trophies to be broken, and nothing more.

You never went to the funeral; lies didn't deserve
your tears, and so you cried at home with the lights
off, and the house dark
so he couldn't see you through the ceiling.

and bitterness washed away every good memory you might have kept as you rubbed them from your eyes, red and raw with salt: it tore at your skin.

Forgiveness only came at thirty-one, when death reached into your spine,
plucking nerves and bone with its spiderling fingers and birthing pain
in a car crash-- you wept in the light when the glass hit
your face like crystal tears and you realized just how close death is

and that maybe you'd wasted all this time in hate,
and that maybe, no one ever means to die.