A difficult conversation….
“No she’s nowhere here,” she tells him/her/them.
“Don’t you know what they used to do during wartime? when the axis was flying across your waters, and the prescient foretold of sky exploding into fire and desert sand crystalizing into iridescent glass because in a certain slant of light even plutonium is radiant, not merely radioactive and-
don’t you know they’d send their light to the countryside, to till the fields and live amongst the forest sprites, and no you wouldn’t believe in trees though you believe in a man three days dead ascending to the firmament, and that’s beside the point, I don’t want to argue-
this is only the second date.
You ask where my light is, well she’s not for you, and she’s not for me-
when the soldiers reached my skin I sent her away, she lives there now, through the door too subtle for humans to see-
What?
No.
No, I won’t be calling her back.
I am too full of shrapnel, muscle macerated by bullets built to rip through skin. See, from the neck down, I am simply metal teeth and scar tissue and besides she’s happy in the other space-
Of course. That’s where my heart is. So you can see this is why I can’t love you even though you’re loveable and it is your right to be loved. But you can have my thoughts and words and even my good deeds,
and no, no, you’re right, it is not enough, but it is all I have to give.”
Word upon Word 