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To Anne
Now I lay me down to you undo my knotted fists and mask to push like children from my mouth the violence you mark as truth why you'd rather die than love why the flesh is innocent why no answers ever save and how to build God one by self exuberance you spun like rope that burned your wrists and scarred your neck yet kept you dancing barefooted on feet that swung just off the floor you take away my blanket to wash the smell of sleep away then cover me in nightmares to keep the gods within you prayed a thousand prayers like bees that stung and swelled up into flowers for the little girl that grinned before she began to hate herself and so you left her one last note as if loneliness had a cure. "Be your own woman," you wrote. "Belong to those you love."* these two lines, the last with wings, to you were not in contradiction to your work, nor to your death, nor to your pretty pill-rimmed eyes for when your fingers began their breathing above your typewriter of belief, you knew that love longed so to bleed out from that honest, single wound. |