The window is cold against my forehead and I think Well, this is it. I have called out the name of this intersection and got it right without even opening my eyes. I know all the streets, I know all the people. I need to get out of here or die. Rock music from the nineties is playing on the radio up between the front seats and we’re all moving to the music in small subtle ways. We went up the mountain to look at the Japanese totem poles then came back down. Youth in car in a minor way, {choir} piano [violins]. We read out loud the public announcement rocks by the light of their cell phones, moving the instruments line by line across the carved rock like poorly written film characters. We ran as if the camera was not a steady cam behind us and one-eighty-ed out of the parking lot. We were heroes on the hunt for the worst doughnuts a human bring being could consume. It’s always a shorter trip on the way back. The mind has collected the data and knows the length of the words, the notes to the verse. I wonder how many places I’ll have to live before I’ll begin to drop this place like crumbs for the birds to eat behind me; how long do I have to grow my hair until the prince climbs up and I blind him on the thorns of my castle, the short curls that spike gold in the shower that I refuse so far to cut.
I should be asleep now, spreading my hands and naked but for a whimper in the darkness waiting for the sun to rise but it doesn’t seem to be happening. I’m wondering instead the etiquette of sending someone flowers and when on earth is england going to wake up already. Daylight savings, savings and penny-less moments, false hood fake button up oxford, I’m not cut out for this. I want to shout from a rooftop but I never was any good at that. Yes I could get the volume, but never the right kind of witness. There’s something fey in my bitterness, there’s something wild in my mind. I can’t let it out, I don’t know how. I want to tear its tongue out, and pour out the collected spectre telling me that I’m not good enough. That no way will I ever find a life to hold to my heart as something I treasure and want to keep. Never will I get out of this place. This city is so small to me, I bat against the edges like a moth. The lunar ghost glittering reflected against the rim of her mountain basin world. The curve of my back is the curve of a bow, my joy used to be an arrow.
