Angels of Acropolis

Stalin's eyes and Lennon's heart. The kitten with lion's claws. The hunt may take place in the backyard, but the prey ends up no less dead. So said the apron as it wore the chef. In sauces spilled and juices poured. Like metaphors drooling from the follies of poets. Naked under all that filth.

I built a kingdom out of maybe's. Stopped breathing that it might stand. Then someone came too close to me and my castle collapsed. It's no accident that there are 52 cards in a deck. The same amount of weeks in a year. It's wasn't desperation. It wasn't loneliness. It was just want.

I like alone. But I liked it better sometimes when you were there. It was all in the taste because there was never any nourishment. I was hungry throughout. I wanted you to make me better. But you only just made me want.

The kinds of things that we imagine life has in store for us. The sort of happiness that is believed to exist, though no one's ever captured it.

With every trap we set we only lose more of the bait.

Until.

I finally let the pigeon go. Free to deliver its message. All that time I shouldn't have been looking for the finish. It was the start I lacked.

When every sheet has fallen into place and still the blankets don't know where to go. I look out the window. Eyeing the streetlights as they waiver against all that darkness. And tell myself I made it too easy for them. Too hard for myself.

Because they got to go home again, but I never did.

Not because of any scarecrow. In fields less than green. Or any questions too dark to color in. Judas's with empty pens still writing on crumbling walls. The crucifix of having tried to love hanging heavy around my neck.

But unlike religion, in life, there is no sacrifice great enough to resurrect what is dead. Nor quench our sins.

All this time I thought my crown of thorns had roses on it. And just as with hell, heaven huddled somewhere inside the act of living.

That if I died enough I'd eventually be born again.

I wasn't wrong.

I just thought it would last longer than it did.

The angels looked down and I saw your face, but they wouldn't waitt.

now you're gone.

And if I want it back I don't know how to say it. Or that I even have the right.

To ask for what was never mine to begin with.