Why Do I Crave Love So Much That I Lie To Get It. I Dawn Facades To Taste Sugar With A Tongue That Is

Smaller hearts beat faster, ever faster. Run rabbit run ever faster, ever faster. I’ll cut your finger cut your thumb, wear a plaster, wear a plaster. I’ll tell your secrets to the room, such disaster, such disaster.

Forgive me gentle heart, I didn’t mean to be a bastard.

I never knew nothing could be so heavy as it is now. Air rests in my hands like handlebars on a bike to nowhere. Chain links of silence drill their fingers into my ears, it is all I can hear now. My muscles weary from carrying do not rest now that he is gone. They anticipate the next departure. They cling to routine, clutching, clutching, unable to let go. All they’ve ever known is hanging on, just another day. What is there left for them now but emptiness, slopping down like wet concrete. Frozen in time.

Why can’t you let me have anything? Why can’t you let me have anything? I ask the mirror.

The girl in it is too busy weeping to answer.

“Why do you eat men?” The sailor asked the siren.

“You ate us first,” she replied.

If I pull the dagger out

What will be left of me

I am blood unspilt, nothing more.

What is there to do but wait for everything to come crashing down in a sudden cold splendor, and remove the sand from beneath my feet.

I need a new wardrobe—I’m running out of time to be young and beautiful. For people to see me and not just look at me out of some mundane politeness. I need to be everything I am right now in these fleeting moments, or it’s like they’ve already gone.

It’s easier for the caterpillar to die than to grow wings. You cannot choose ease when splendor demands difficulty.

Dirt bends into the maw of the mother’s wound, blood coldly trickling out of her, unhurried and luxuriant like vomiting molasses. She died by missile; its nose dove unflinching through her kitchen’s closed window and flung open the curtains and obliterated the walls like a dozen sledge hammers cracking concrete in cacophony. Dinner was not set to be served until 15 after 5 o clock; nobody waited at that table but her. Setting plates down on linen, forks and spoons down on napkins, face flat down on the broken checkered tile and a split where her ribs used to be. And so much dirt. She never would’ve allowed that, particular as she was about the dusting of the varnished oak wood and the shining of the tarnished silver, dying under such layers of soot would’ve killed her again if her eyes were ever to open. She must’ve died instantly, so instantly, that her body had time to give away its warmth as she lay bleeding slugs, for there was contentment on her face. Like she had just gotten the table setting the way she liked it, and she imagined the faces of her family sitting there none the wiser to the effort she put in to create their everyday fairy tale. But she knew. I’m glad that she knew just how wonderful she was, that particular anal persnickety woman whose home was mistaken for a terrorist’s.

I know not what to say to her, her wide eyes eat up my thoughts as the sun does water; my head is entranced in cloud when I am with her. Siren on the rocks, I wish only for rainfall so that my skin feels as yours does.

-Diary of a siren