Cut and Paste

In kindergarten when you ate the paste it wasn't because it tasted good. It was because it was forbidden. Every night is kindergarten. Every person paste. I'm not catholic, but you'd think I was. With the guilt and regret. And inappropriate pigtails. My grandmother was. Catholic. When she was a child. Not really anything as an adult. Siren perhaps. Incubus. Lioness in heat forgetting her cubs.

That is the evolution of survival. That surviving depends upon amnesia. The innate tendency to discontinue loving anything, anyone that is gone. That is life. That is its sour seed that grows deep inside each of us.

In first grade when you told the boy. You didn't do it to hear him say he liked you too. You did it because you knew it was hopeless. Every day is first grade. Every person is him.

This is the frailty of life. A paradox of loyalties that invariably cease the moment we can't use them anymore. This is the truth of happiness. A swarm of bees attacking as we catch the bits of nectar that drop.

There the future was writ in forbidden paste on kindergarten lips. Our paradises lost before we ever knew we had them.

A drop of honey on stung, stung skin. Edens drawn in red sheets with fingers that still smell of kindergarten.