Crepuscular Rays

She wore matchsticks in her hair, parading around, green ice cream abroad like she was the Statue of Liberty. I was that young once--did young me see me here? Hope to find me amidst the briers and thorns, scalp of thorns, a millennial martyr, opposed to the friar, the town crier, caught in a higher mire like a funeral pyre, is it so dire? To blow anywhere in the breeze like a flyer? Barbed wire attire and a caustic personality of misfire, what desire do you require, try vehemently to acquire? To never tire, feeling the fire from the liar's back, take a crack of the whip, a sip of something sweet, a snippet of time which has long forsaken us. And here I sit, on a rusted park bench while the sky darkens like a brow, bracing for the impending storm. 

I had a dream where I was loved, held through the clouds of mist and fog, chin cupped in the hand of a one and only who wore white like an angel. I dreamed this dream and found it hard to wake up, to get up, to move on, knowing that this was a passive phantom bordering on my peripheral, a feral fault I favored. 

Heart shaped candies, pistols, red bandannas, mint sprigs. The bare, raw burn of cinnamon gum. A bureau, cluttered with beloved benevolence, creatures and currents saved from the loneliness of a garbage pail, objects that pale in the afternoon sun that glints through the emerald sun catcher adjacent to the burnished gold circle mirror that catches the head and the heart and this is but all. Candles, and wicker bags, and pale lavender ribbon and Polaroids ever browning from the warmth of a lie that this would have all been remembered without them. 

We walked through the hearth of the city, globe lights strung up, cutting diagonal lines into the night sky. Green cappuccinos and amber colored bottles found among the nostalgia of an antique shop newly arisen along the strip. We got the creme brulee once, that was all we got and we laughed at the shrug the waitress gave as we nervously tittered away at our simplistic order of a sinfully sweet hors-d'oeuvre. 

The corals and cobalts of the art museum, gold, heartily embellished frames that embalm the bombastic artistic quality found within each abstraction. 

Everything is so much clearer and quieter, how I always wanted these things to be. I'll sweat and scream into the night, thinking that I'm back where I had begun. I know I'm not there and that I'll never be there again, but still it echoes, hollow in the night, questioning my resolve and Renaissance resistance, asking indifferently if I really did escape, or if I'm simply believing another lie fed to me on a plastic silver spoon, leftover from a New Year's Eve party so cheap, so phony, and so far away from here, this night, tonight. 

Is anything real? Do we all just live inside our own minds, playing to our own fantasies each and everyday? Is it all misconstrued by our tender, innocent want of something better, something more, something fantastically opposed to the inane? Our hearts may skip without reason, stars that hover around our crowns, heels as pink and as soft as worn ballet slippers. Fingers as slender as expensive cigarettes, caressing barley hair on top of eyes that shine like the wax on a new playing card--oh king, the queen, a jack of all trades, trades his life for blissful folly along the wrinkles of the brain, something that could be described as sane in this world so vain, heavily revolved around the human vein.