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Taper
Back when my hair was still lit
wiith hues of candle tongues
and whispers of caramel candies
I wanted to grow up
and live in a mosaic castle
With clothes of silk and
rings adorning each small finger.
It never occurred to me that
Princes in shining armor
and fairies that granted wishes
Existed only in the sleek pages of
story books lined on my shelf.
In my 5-year old mind,
A throne and crown
Could be waiting just blocks down
from my own, boring brick house.
When I entered the place
of blue plastic chairs and laminated pages
My dreams of queens and princesses diminished
and my head was instead filled with
Alphabetical nonsense and
words pronounced differently
than they really looked.
It all seemed so silly back then.
Why would a person
ever wish to contain so many babbling numbers and
criss crossing letters that soon enough
Fairy tales would end up squashed in a closet and
wishes that were all so serious at one point
suddenly evaporated?
My hair tapered and a strong, thick wick
threaded into different shades of brown
curled around my head. Thoughts of princesses
subsided and I was left in a state
Of not-wanting. Not unwanting, just
Not wanting. Nothing called to me-
I was simply a girl playing with mud pies
And hammocks of rope and
Summer night splinters.
Night came and I was swept away
in my own clutter of disassembled happiness and
crumbling plaster. My hair burned
into a heated sizzling mess of dissolved wax.
The black dripped and crawled its way down my neck,
scalding my fermenting skin,
leaving imprints of its inflictions singeing my body.
From morning gold to
afternoon maple to
midnight black
I burned
until my entire self resided
and became the nothingness of a scented candle,
the millimeter of a twisting wick,
the outline of melted wax.
Today had finished and
Yesterday was dead and
Tomorrow tasted
Years away.
The fragrance of fire
turned out to be
far stronger than a schedule of
Unrelated weeks with
Conjugated days and
Hypothetical predictions
Of next month's meetings.
The paper would curl
In the mouth of orange tendrils
And I would relish it all as it
Went down in flames.
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