She steps into the dark swamp
where the long wait ends.

The secret slippery package
drops to the weeds.

She leans her long neck and tongues it
between breaths slack with exhaustion

and after a while it rises and becomes a creature
like her, but much smaller.

So now there are two. And they walk together
like a dream under the trees.

In early June, at the edge of a field
thick with pink and yellow flowers

I meet them.
I can only stare.

She is the most beautiful woman
I have ever seen.

Her child leaps among the flowers,
the blue of the sky falls over me

like silk, the flowers burn, and I want
to live my life all over again, to begin again,

to be utterly
wild.

Is it such a shameless sin
To fall in love with who you are within?
No one ever speaks of how beautiful they can be
If they didn't put an entire focus and energy
On artificial eye pleasers
To tease the mind
To define beauty
With a worthless dime & an impossible size
If you keep depending on everyone else to tell you you're lovely
For who will you perform when crowd leaves?

You count the calories
Instead of the stars
For the world to see
Another beautiful body.
To run the long mile
So your thighs don't touch
Will who you really are ever be enough?
You've wandered down a street
Where the washed up women are all so cheap
For red lipstick you are a thief
Who will you be
When the audience retreats?

Once the whole world disappears
Into meadows of flowering fields
And numbers are but an illusion so far
All you'll have left to count on are those ******* stars.