a testament to ourselves

1.

She traced eight letters 

On my chest, a child drawing God in the sand 

And I leaned back

Her hair, 

Torrents flowing to the tiniest pinpoints

Tracing their chaos on my skin.

2.

I found out God is dead

While reading a book I didn’t understand 

And wondered who read the eulogy

When I should have been asking who wrote it

I suppose it would only be fitting

For us to hold hands and chant the thing

Together, dancing

In the freshly turned soil, 

Mashing His memory into cheap boxed wine.

I learned that love too was gone,

But those are entirely separate subjects. 

3.

I’ve lost something, much in the way you feel you’ve misplaced your keys or the remote, but not quite that. There’s a memory trapped, it’s been dipped in glue and laid flat to the inside of my skull. Now the glue has dried leaving a murky off white film over the top of it all. My eyes are out of focus to begin with, so making the memory clear is damned near impossible, but I know how it makes me feel. I feel like I’ve lost something I can’t get back.

4.

The curse is the blessing

She whispered in my ear, but the words were ephemeral

A jeremiad of silver to line the spite

Spewed from the heart of the matter

5.

We stood on the edge of an art form

Hoping to form

Something, though art was more than we could honestly hope for,

With a child’s wild ambitions and the overwhelming ocean that was

Everyone and everything before us.

We were children tracing the face of death. 

We were children.

Praying for words we didn’t know yet

We were…

or at least we hoped that one day we would be.

Youth striving for Immortality, 

while failing to realize

Failing is the only option

On the errand of fools and stubborn old men.

We stood at the front of the line and sold our wares to the lowest bidders, 

Wearing our souls to the bone, 

Chilled to the bone,

And selling our skeletal faith, 

No longer Knowing what form we took to start