By the Dead Purple Lady Published in the May 2019 issue of The Write Launch Literary Magazine poetry You could no more take the green from grass or take the dark from night
than you could take the purple from the dead lady you made me touch
her unbothered hands sincere in their end. There is no such thing
as funerals for children in a world in which adults are consumed by the denial
of faeries in their tales so full up on misconceptions about the nature of death and
the nature of children. All of your anguish in life was wasted on you
because you never learned to be wretched and your sermons possessed you.
There was no saving you. No exorcism of you. You just let strange and inappropriate expectations masquerade as love and you made me into what you
expected and needed at the time. You contained multitudes from your life of you
and no one knew if they were witnessing a ruination or a rumination
when you grabbed me by the hand to kneel by the dead purple lady
in the crate with the sincerely finished hands and then demanded
I repent. And people just let you. There were unnamed demons flying everywhere.