you just break me with your beauty

yesterday as i walked out of the restaurant i noticed the pale faces, the traces of life in the lack..but the want was too strong, strong like the descent of lead in the part of the ocean that's dark. disappear. they've disappeared. their ghosts haunt their gazes, on the brink of abandon. i can't tell if they've forfeited or if they never knew to come in the first place. and i feel like, "am i the only one really here??" the empty streets were not only in dreams, they are here, full of everything that's not, bursting and bustling with the nothing. the sound of silence pours into my skull like cold thick medicine, a prescription for a misdiagnosed condition. "i never knew you!" i said, "i never knew you before. i don't want to, i don't. you're uninvited and please go."

the pushpins on the wall beside the door: primary colors.
oh how i hate those hues.
horrible, ugly, reds and blues. greens and yellows. overused. trusted so quickly so lastingly only because they came first. oh i hate them and i always have. it's the unimaginitive decor in a toddler's nursery, a sentence imposed on an innocent, unwittingly intended to stifle his life and to ensure uniformity, conformity. "Die, Variety!" they shouted in their sleep, striped sleeves pumping starchy signs (painted up in primaries no doubt): a protest they all joined in the end (the end before The End, the one that came with the adoption of the color palate of their parents, the one that finished them before they even started).

everything in that place, in those few brief moments, strangled me. the apathy with which it grappled me was stunningly hideous. i curled my lips at it and said goodbye, and not farewell, for well to fare would not dwell there. i burst into the winter air, free and new and down the stair and on the ice and in my hair i felt the willing of the world--the canvas asked--for more. more than four, or maybe five. more than life... To Be Alive! i made a list i've made before, silly really: seafoam green. robin's egg blue. espresso. magenta. but it's mine. and they sky today agreed with me, i heard him answer with his ownly shade of blue. he made the frosted world, the branches coated in his breath, pop upon his sprawling chest like the mysterious fluff that sticks out of grandpa's shirt...oh he loves us even though we hardly notice him with his big arms around us.

but they keep asking me to stay. their vacant gazes, spectral summons, make my bones cold. a chill inside is hard to shake. i lay under layers, flannel, down, all around, because i know i have to stay a little longer. but the cold is getting stronger. it's not the cold that worries me now--i know it won't take me. it's the sickness. the sick is the stay. i need their help now, and they gladly oblige, because it's what they do. they survive. they will keep me alive, until it's time to go. but they don't know. no, where i'm going...they can't.

"these bright eyes were built by lies," they theorize, halfheartedly humoring me (if i accidentally idealize out of the bounds of my own mind). i wish they could see! oh i see so many things that could be...but here i am (here we are) in black and white, in lack of light that might reveal them. i'll wait, i'll wait until i go. but in the meantime, it tires me so to daily wake and cake on this cadaverous foundation. and you will argue because you see me doing it, but do you live this? do you know? i can't keep on with color, i'm tired and it's just easier to hide and endure. it's wasted here. isn't it? a tear may fall and reveal a tone, and that moment real may reach but one, and that's all i can give. because color loses its meaning when it's lost in blind eyes. "am i dying?" i wonder...can it exist if no one believes in it?

oh the beautiful are few and far between. "i never met you, oh but how i've longed to! are you lonely out there? are you dying, are you lying beneath layers, with cold bones? i hope you know i'm out here too, loving you!" mister poe, and brother weiss, kensrue, lewis, burton, Christ...you ignite my marrow and i thank you, from the depths of this long winter. i will join you in good time and bring you something somehow mine and somehow ours and somehow someday maybe it will shatter a buried beauty like how you have broken me. (hold fast hope!)



Annabel Lee
by Edgar Allan Poe
http://bau2.uibk.ac.at/sg/poe/works/poetry/annabel.html