Lactate Intolerant

Sweetness lingers in spite of false threat of suffocation. He keeps lots of

pillows in case someone might want to smother him. All she ever wanted was

photos for the yearbook, scraps for the scrapbook, pieces for the quilt.

Someday it’ll all be just mementos in a tea tin, and dolls in a heart shaped

box. Someday she’ll be eating the dust and cursing the grave. Bracing for the

day he doesn’t come back, inevitable as monsoon rain, another price to pay,

another heartbreaking work of genius. When you die can I have your shadow?

Written in stone, written in ink, written in a name that cannot be erased. Said

aloud it becomes a story and all stories have inevitable endings. I’m wishing

for a John Irving epilogue but prophesy a Leonard Cohen afterworld. A heart is

just a vital organ, and I’m used to having those removed. A thousand years from

now it’ll just be me and the cockroaches immortal and living in the ruins.

Someday I’ll escape to tell the tale. Someday I’ll write the gospel of the

name. Till then I am harvesting the milk of human kindness. Drink deep and be

forgiven, a babe at the breast and innocent again. I want nothing and I am

nothing but all the nothing that I am is yours to lean on. I know you’ll take

my secrets to the grave. It’s all just words, it doesn’t have to make sense, it

just has to sound pretty.

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