A Dulling of the Senses

A Dulling of the Senses

She’s so pretty.
She is the sun, shining gold liquour,
fattening you up, so that you may roll
in drunken rapture, like a playful fish.
Just a glimpse of this side of beauty,
rouses pride as well as muscle,
and she knows this, believes it
and walks a certain kind of poise;
mettle in silk.

She’s a woman. You told her so.

When she’s so pretty,
you open your eyes
and go deaf.
You see her black cherry roundness,
her precious salmon lips
and forget that she pumps with blood.
You dismiss her heart,
when the lips come apart,
caring more about her come-hither slither,
than her words.
She then is rendered dumb.

It’s when she gives in,
when the layers are peeled back
revealing a new skin,
that the earth spins and you are sobered.
She’s a dash of salt in a gash,
the crumb left in the butter.
She brought down the church,
toppling the steeple with a winded sigh,
and none of her confessions will bait your mercy.

When she indulges her appetites,
she’s an abomination;
an atrocity in lace, gnawing on a bone.
Gluttony is far from ladylike,
and she’ll swell for her sins
but it won’t be your fault.
You told her to stop,
though you ate your fill.

As the skin begins to stretch
into spongy, marshmallow bulges,
she looks leveled and worn,
with pained buttons, and broken-wire hair.
You look away, refusing her,
calling this the consequence of
her apathy.
She then becomes undone.

You surmise that her rightful place
is with cats and hens,
clawing and pecking
for some sort of order.
When she smiles, you think she’s cracking
and when she cries into her hands,
lost in the ‘why’s’, you tell yourself
its nothing more than cyclic, chemical hysteria.
The other girls look just fine.

She can’t remember how to walk in heels,
though they’d once been part of the armour.
She’d smelled like lavender,
when her hair was velvet, but now
she smells like soured milk.
She had a name, and you don’t use it.

You call her weak,
blind to the weight she carries,
and she loses blood by the bucket
while you gag on a hangnail,
and still, she mothers you.
Is this nobility, a disposition of nature,
or a slow deadening of sensation?

You tell her that tears are her failing,
a slick manipulation,
but she says that yours would be a
badge of strength, a reason to go on.

She knows everything,
except how she got here
and how your blindness
made her so unpretty.