It starts with a song

a fictional woman's croons

to her perception,

to expectation of man,

foreshadowed dissent-

-A determined face frozen

inches from the screen

immersed in coy messages

bigger than her growing mind

Lovers made you into cotton candy clouds and strawberry sunsets. Craving indulgence in the sinful syrup that drips from your thighs but do they know that the nectar they dream of is the venom that’s polluted the minds of adulterine lovers?

You lure them away with promises of juicy twilight and honeysuckle haze.

You laugh for the encore as they fall to their knees, begging for devotion. This is what you want to be, flower? No, sweet flower, that's not you, and people like him saw that. He saw that underneath the compulsive lies was a prize.

He saw that beneath your ruin was Eden, and greed could not consume him the way it consumed the rest. He did not beg for you... he studied you. He watched the way you thrived and built you a greenhouse to keep you alive, Flower.

Who’s gone the distance to love you so dearly? Was it the woman who suffocated you? Or was it the man that lied to you? It must've been the woman who broke you.

But wait

It wasn’t

Abandon them, flower, for each of them carries their own poison, each bringing you closer to a lonelier death than the last.

Live in the greenhouse, sweet flower, for here you are transcendent.

His mind is clouded with random thoughts, but his hands kept on with the tasks given, by his side what seemed to be an unending pile of documents. Minimal of what is actually assigned to him, mainly of files just pushed onto him, even at the last minute right before the office hours end.

And he typed. And typed. And typed.

As if hypnotized to reach the end of the line.

Until everyone else had left already.

Yet he remained unfazed, as if the microcosm he lives in is within the span of the cluttered desk and tiny cubicle. By the time the clock hit five in the morning, he had finally printed the last set of paperwork, which he had placed on top of the team leader’s table.

Few stretches and he started moving again, the same random thoughts resurfacing, towards the cold stairway. In a few minutes, he reached the rooftop. By then his thoughts had molded into a pitch blank canvas, as if reminding him that he had finally reached the end.

At last, he reached the end.

By then, the city’s just starting to wake up, but standing by the ledge, he just started to close his eyes. Then it was the morning breeze embracing him like a cool blanket, and by the next moment that his eyes had opened, he has already laid down on the asphalt road, reminding him of the tough bed at his rented apartment, staring straight into the dimly lighted sky.

And upon seeing him, the company would start preparing to replace the lost spot, checking through the pool of hoping applicants. His colleagues would see the documents and go on with the meetings, presentations, and chit-chats. And a different face would then be facing his computer, seated on his swivel chair, and take-over his tasks.

Until another mind gets clouded with random thoughts, with the hands still on the keyboard, by the side a pile of documents. Mostly from others, a trifle, the actual work.

And they will type. And type. And type.

As if hypnotized to reach the end of the line.

From Timbuktu

To Nubia

Sally promised

Great prosperity

For all tribes

In each ancient

Advanced civilization

With folks that had

Such vast wealth

Then they unknowingly

Gave their power to Sally

Who handed them seashells

Promising them a much

Greater treasure/reward

Alas, that was all for nichts!

The villages had a loss

For quite a vast majority

Of their natural beauty,

Their precious minerals,

& stones, too, wasted away

For a meager price of seashells!

#Seashells...

Nov. 30, 2022.

Wōdnesdæg.

Cranberry pops

on eager lips

beneath a sun

beaten canopy

Rushing leaves

softly hum

a mournful carol

for a present misgiven

But then, in the

cool rush of night

A star hints

at the wrong path

lights twinkle

sinfully, deceptively

The birth of knowledge,

hard-earned

Canes of sugar

crack and rot

sickly sweetness

pungent in the dark

Virgin once wrapped

in tinsel and light,

transmuted non-believer-

birthed within the

fickleness of devotion

She'd searched for every version of the song she could find. The original was fine, she supposed. It deserved the top spot it'd earned over thirty years prior. But now, it felt corny. A punchline possessing the airways. It made her feel like her hair wasn't teased enough. Her pants were too loose. Leather was hardly appropriate in this economy. She wasn't a smoker and she didn't like dark liquor, so could she really give the original version the pensiveness it deserved? It deserved to be mulled over, to be quietly listened to in a dark room as a tortured artist took sips directly from a glass bottle and stared out the window, moonlight casting a harsh glow on the mistakes of the past.

That wasn't her. She was two kids and a cheap bottle of merlot away from being a full blown wine mom. She spent too much money at HomeGoods. Her overpriced, overly sweet coffee drinks were singlehandedly keeping her local Starbucks in business. She wore pastel colored tank tops with sayings like "Good Vibes Only" and had spent countless hours of her life working carefully to create the perfect messy bun. She thought "Live, Laugh, Love" was cheesy but was not above hanging a giant sign reading "GATHER" in the dining room.

Still, the covers of the song fell flat. They injected poppy, cheery beats where it didn't belong. The vocals were too sweet or too empty. The artists could sing it, but they didn't feel it. Not like she did.

She felt it, as they both lied silently still in the dead of night. The house was drafty and though the two complained often of the chilled air emanating from the untreated windows, they slept untouching from opposite ends of the queen sized mattress. They took turns shrugging off the other's touch. Where it started, she didn't know. Where it would end was unclear, but she silently wondered if it already had.

The song had run the rounds through her skull for a matter of days now. She knew it well enough. She could find it with ease. But she'd skirted around it. She thought she'd been simply been searching for something more palatable, but she now considered that maybe it wasn't the antiquated nature of the song she was avoiding- it was the undeniable sting of experience. Some stories, she guessed, will stick with us forever, regardless of when or where they're told.

She turned off the Real Housewives rerun playing in the background, picked up her iPhone, and tapped a few times on the screen. The strumming of an acoustic guitar filled the air surrounding her. A deep, shaky voice followed the strumming and began to tell a story with uncomfortable familiarity. She took a slow sip from her Iced Sugar Cookie Almondmilk Latte and stared out the window, the mid-day sun casting a harsh light on the implications of the future.