time

time (questioning the pathos)

Do we exist encapsulated?

You and I, cocooned somewhere - these fictions of former selves fossilized.

It's cathartic to believe that I triumphed, that I lived, that this version succeeded in rising bones out of metamorphic rivers of ash.

But so bittersweet to know that some other girl - some other part - didn't rise the same. 

Do we exist entirely?

Whole in the future fragments, this stitched up vision of Shelley's creation with the lines blurred as a whisper asks monotone - when did you become so much more monster...so much less mother...so miserable? 

Did I come back monstrous?

These canines were always there, but you carved me down until blood ran from between my gums! Blood, my favorite taste, but not when you took it from me.

You would've hoisted me on the petard you made us, or raised my ribs out the back for the heart you said you gave me, but you 

misinterpreted 

man's 

autonomy, 

you machine.

Free to love now, she rubs her fingers together and starts fires where the dead things grow up thick.

Do we exist ephemeral?

Good dogs - they don't last nearly long enough. Grandfather, in every waking nightmare, shoots him through the brain, and out of blood spatters children shape the future like little fortune-tellers. 

See mine - there, beside his knotted little finger in the dust?

I lose my love.

I lose my body.

I lose everything but the husk of a soul - the husk that floats out in the cold cosmos and waits to be born again. This is re-animation...how else can you describe it? How else can you withstand the flowers shooting out of your veins, moss curling from your fingernails, sprouts coming through your ribs? 

Father, Your creation is all noise, all shriek, all voice!

Only death whispers.

The living is one eternal scream. One eternal, bursting flow of molten joy.

Do we exist eternal?

You and I?

Our souls agree, these petrified lights that somehow, stubbornly, refuse to go out.

Because, somewhere, we are curled up together like two fern leaves encased in a final, breathy amber exhalation, and if you're holding onto me I'm begging you to never, ever let me go.

I will be born again. This one, as sharp and feral as she may be, can't live forever. 

But she, bloodstained, will take up such a kind burial beside her sisters, in such a pretty little garden where all that I've needed has gone to lay down.

We exist encapsulated.

All of our selves, you and I, lie somewhere together, and sleep with arms unfolded -

waiting for one last day when we need remember how long we've lived

and how sweet it's been to grow unrecognizable.