Night is a loosening plum. The sky ripens itself then drops to the ground. I wear its thigh sheen, a violet blubber. Watch the regrowth into dawn, air’s hard yellow fruit. Every night adds. I become a sealed animal, rippling gazes toward high jewels. Quiet. Do you hear my insides dissolve as if meat were ice. Like eating plums, air crashed against a tongue, evaporating velvet, the blush-water taste. Why have I been built wrong? My insides have left me or are hidden. Will shoveling release me? I touch hard and then explode like perfect dots of skin wafting down from ears and needles. I would like to shed all things that I touch, starting with the doorknob floating in my deep dumb cut. It twists open, I don’t like it, how I move, a finger from a stove. So I slough. All that slime drips down, creating light and day. My filth is a snowball made from shadows. I shine. Can I pinch out a head and legs? I can. I can make a ragdoll, a purple thing to love, since humans drift away from me, so sure of their magnetic skeletons, how something will attach. I’m not so sure, you crafted and jointed old bugs, you moon fragments in puppetry. I find I don’t care and don’t know about most things. Daughter, you will spend years untangling purple knots, when truthfully there is no pearl inside any gleaming shell. So when someone decides to remove your head, you’ll agree. You’ll decide that a calm body is worth that toothless feeling, a bad flower yanked, sudden nerves poking whitely from the stub. You’ll be left with dead beginnings, no more heart just part of all. You’ll accept the new head, the new sifting, the desire for everything you got rid of. You’ll walk lost, daughter, but night breathes with you, scouring old echoes.
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