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Description
Girl sits.
Watching the glass boil and bubble
With clenched hands.

Where women speak with nervous shivers
Discussing things great and darkish
Speaking truths and lies from behind windowpanes.
And what is there to gain?
What is there to gain?

Girl sighs.
Great claws pluck her gently up
And drop her into the chaos that still boils in death throes.

I cannot speak for knowing
That a wind is ever blowing.
For this is what I have been taught
In my plastic desk that gasps and grasps a plastic chair tight to its side
With a thin metal arm like a sapling in a storm
This is the norm.

Girl screams.
Skin searing as claws open mercifully
Too much, too soon.

As men dine on steaks and biscuits,
Women upon water,
They peer out into a fine world through fine windows and screens and glass
Remarking in carefully cultured voices what a fine place it all is
Taking care to blink away the undesirables.
Ladies sip ice water and nibble celery sticks
Eyes and angles dark as they remark
On beauties stark and excessive.

Girl stills.
Glass hardening on all sides,
She barely bears to blink.

Come one or all
Test your strength, your wit
For who can be proven?
Who can pull this dagger from the breast of cold Juliet
And whisper truths into her cold ears?
One who died of love,
Who can tell her
Of how we have progressed above her triviality
Of how we have digressed to such mentality?

Girl melts.
Overcome, overwhelmed by the heat
She drips out of her shell through the escape hatch in her sole.

There will be a time
To burn the masks you’ve made to meet the masks that you have met
If you choose to do so.
If in the face of such a blaze
You possess truth sufficient to break your face
And discover what lies beneath.

Girl pools
In a murder-scene puddle on the cold concrete.
Reporters blind her liquid eyes with camera flashes.

Come and go
And go
Sticking cold shovels into cold dirt
In treasure hunt of worms and corpses and trash
That were shoved out of sight of owls and eyes
To growl and grow in the pits of limbs.
O what atrophy!
O what deterioration!
How this wild earth can cover up the faults
That bite and itch the ankles of a nation.

Glass waits.
Imprinted by a mourning face
That cannot weep as the stream of living surges by

Balloons fly into rain-dark skies
Destination optional
And leave the runt of the litter tarrying in the mud
String caught in the branches of a burning bush
And flaming letters whisper that Judah has passed

Glass watches.
People swarm by without glancing at her frosted frozen face.
Children smile.

Golden fish turn figure eights in wafer-thin wine glasses
While amazing Grace and Lady Liberty sip tea and weep,
Dreaming of when they had begun
And sharing their apocalypses while they marvel at the similarities.
You can still hear echoes of the yelling
What sounds get lost in the telling?

Glass wonders.
Of the imprint locked forever in its core, in its care
And of the face of the girl.

An eye in every living room
In every tomb,
Weeping electric tears
And reflecting the mood of a people
Plagued by white picket fences and two-point-five children.
They sell themselves before a community
Who watches their failures
And lick their lips
In love with the downfall.

Glass speaks.
The shell of girl’s lips parting
And sending small cracks from the corners of her mouth like lines of age.

Is there a place where I will scream
And none will hear?
Where all will hear?
Where it will matter?

Glass crumbles.
The word barely past the brittle throat, fragile lips
Before cracks overcome her shell and she can no longer stand to stand.

Where parrots call and white bears ramble.
Where fish and birds can breathe alike.
I rest in pearls
That speak like prophets
Weeping in bell tones from silver cages
And telling what a life there could have been.

Glass girl scatters in a million pieces on the dark hardwood floor.
An invisible crime that shows naught but beauty
And a sky inverted.

But what did she say?
It doesn’t matter, anyway.

It never does.