She's counting calories and mumbling numbers aloud,
making minute adjustments to the value they've assigned her.
Determined at birth, but her worth should be more impacted by what she's found.
She dreams of the day when she can throw figures away and have her intangibles defined:
the tone of her speech,
whittled down beliefs,
her finger-***** sharpness of mind.

She tracks the dates and diets while waiting,
not impatient nor growing frustrated.
With faith, she knows there will come a day when she'll finally be loved by the blind.

There are some things he can't refuse.
He goes into the dark with a ***.
He's probably out there right now, proposing to a masseuse
with balled up bills in a box.

Caked in sticky layers of soot, from the burning down below.
Layers of filth to fertilize his rotten garden growth.

Bathed in neon light, he goes seeking the obscene.
He showers every single night,
but his mind is far from clean.

Paint with red creation,
white skin tightened grip.
She's grown too sharp with patience;
a ***** to let it in.

Come on if you please.
Stay here if you need.
Pray on bended knees.
(I'll say the rest is due.)

The good men all are taken,
they've taken 'til it's gone.
Sordid imagination,
is this the man you want?

Come on if you please.
Stay here if you need.
Pray on bended knees.
I'll say the rest is due.

The spiral down.
The leaking of pocketed things
swirling above towards sunlight:
3D text of a spilled life.

What you did.
Who you loved.
The things you ate and the things that ate you up.

Awakening in reverse.
A return to the obscurity from which you were born.

The sea keeps no record,
marks nothing in stone,
but sings a eulogy for everyone ever lost to it
heard from any coast.

If my life were less interesting,
would you be less interested in it?
Or me?

Four magenta rings, sheathed in jellied casing,
floating between the rocks.

I popped mine on a barnacle - went backwards too fast.
Barely made it to shore before it was nothing but a limp piece of rubber.

The young ones are out there tossing them around.
Mounds of translucent flesh passed from hand to hand.
Touched, squeezed, pressed; watch this trick.

Harmless, they assure me. I'm less convinced.

On the beach, I find one alone.
No color to it.
A prodding finger.
Soft sensation.
A giving way.

Dumb mass of cells.

Not the product nor conclusion, but the case that merely holds it.
The theory that posits without endeavoring to ever actually prove it.
You are but the hook, the hanger, the mannequin that displays the lifestyle you'll never have the courage to actually wear outside the store that made it.
Doomed to hide in other peoples' lives.
Relishing the moments when someone else is reflected in the mirror.