m---y

“babe, here’s something i just wrote—i think you might like it! it goes like this:

‘the truthful glance you cast upon me felt like concrete poured into a casket
.it crushed me.
crushed me into a pulverized valentine’s card,
you know, the ones with sweet nothings smothered on a canvas donning a bleeding heart;
but this valentine’s card dared to push through to the other side of the cuckoo house nest—
that damned rib cage within this punctured chest.

a noble, humble pursuit

so i then draped that valiant, valentine heart onto the shoulders of blessed pallbearers,
 each convulsion of the sealed casket a decree from the tomb:
i love being nothing for you.
and still, my oldest love lives young.’”

she paused, never being one to first speak without thinking:

“hmm, baby, it sounds quite poetic. its meaning is completely lost to me
but it reminds me of a cherished line my mother always said to me:
‘you know m---y,
 there’s nothing unsettling in our substance of being nor our being of substance.’”

i stirred from the magnitude of that message’s power—
christ, even in my daydreams the girl’s modest.