Counted under murky lenses, we are mistrust. The Dark eyed malice of dawn-broken alleys and bodiless breath on glass. We tread hallways carved by someone else’s fingers in dank and dusk. Wearing her mask, love is at your throat. She nurses the skull like it’s her own and carries a flute of singing bone, giggling through her smile at your remedy of steady hands.

I am neither liberty nor bell, to be taken by a disarming glance or rung simply to tell, but I have never been immune to its naked caress. Honestly, who can tell the difference? We care too much for the silver that dangles around her bunched slouch as she lay there sprawled and layered about all the others. Your flesh was never a wedding dress and the eye of the storm is all we ever sketch.

 Imagine a sculpture that was true to form.

The savant signs no letters and promises no cursive for the feet of our statues. There is no gild or sparkle laced with virtue. I will not offer nor will I accept another surrender. We were never here. They were never there… None of us… Not alone… not together. Pass us down. Pass us on. Wave as we pass and are passed again… And just this once I will admit to having been homesick.

But as it all goes by and comes back around. I have grown tired of being wrapped in the forest… Of trembling at echoes and igniting at a touch… Of recoiling at the recollection of frost. I am shackled by whims and vibrations of memories above and beneath. By the engulfing press of the communal nothing that lies perpetually between us; the hallways we tread through the dust.

In the end, all this convergence builds a fever that I cannot hope to replicate and while hope glares like a lit cigarette, capturing sunset sets seems a little less important.