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tallow

december 16, 2005

Mad angels sing softly just beyond the horizon.
The sky softly feathers.
Those were wild nights,
in a land the sun alternately loves and despises,
wild nights tumbling into gentle days,
wrapping around and around each other,
ice and water burning into one.

Her mind was off dancing on fiery wings,
screaming its joy to the skies,
while her heart lay content,
planted in the earth, trusting.
Thoughts do not bother recognize
when you are in heaven.

They danced in circles,
weaving in each other,
being in each other
the ebb and flow of chaos.
Even this soft touch, even this silence hums.

Until one night, while they flew tangled,
her foot caught blindly on the table,
spilled its contents,
notebooks, keys and trinkets flying everywhere,
with the clatter of someone else's madness.

He stopped.
She, sleepy-eyed in the luxury
of their velvet flesh
gazed curiously at him,
the edge of hurt
not thinking to slip into her voice.
Her eyes traced his, fell
on two drops of tallow lying on the bedspread.

What followed was a tale out of reality,
the walls tearing back
to show a lecture on fire safety.
Didn't you think? You could have burned the whole place down!
While the sun hangs, bitter and unmoving,
sharpening the shadows in days that never seem to end.

I didn't think, she murmurs.
I didn't need to.
And promises she'll remember,
she'll take these lessons to heart.
They're not knives, just innocuous
synthetic partitions to slip into her heart,
preventing the reagents from coming into contact with one another.
Fire, as we all know, is dangerous.

So when he vanishes in the morning,
light footprints in the new-fallen snow,
she is wiser than his ninety-year-old's wisdom.
She will not follow his stubborn trek across the mountains,
nor will she listen,
when he complains she has grown sad and unexciting,
that she is not the joyful girl he once loved,
if he does not want the wise one that he has created.

No.
With a brief glance east of the sun
and west of the moon,
she burns her fairytales
for the strong power in their words,
and carrying only her wisdom
sets off to the city in search of fortune.