White

Boy of the white winter
Death about your shoulders
Draped like a fur coat
Dogging your every step like a wolf long starved
Will it leave you alive just long enough to watch?
Watch as everything you loved is burned in the flames?
Watch as everything you loved is swallowed by the white?

Name

Tell me your name
Shout it from skyscrapers
Whisper it against the curve of my ear in the dark
I want to hold it close to me and press it tight against my chest
Pushing and pushing until it breeches the cage of my ribs
Making a home there alongside my beating heart
Where it will forever remain
—Etched into blood and bone—
So that you will never be forgotten

Life and Death and a Girl

Her mind was made of bright lights,
Flashing, blinding, burning.
Her eyes were made of turquoise oceans,
Pushing, pulling, shining.
Her lips were made of paper love letters,
Touching, kissing, cutting.
Her hair was made of soft grass fields,
Tickling, laughing, hiding.
Her soul was made of rainbow paints,
Rising, arching, falling.
Her heart was made of glass feelings,
Loving, hoping, shattering.
Her blood was made of moon ebbed tides,
Cresting, gushing, pooling.
Her body was made of all these things—beautiful, ugly, tragic—now reduced to skin and bones, promises and scars.
For all the lies her body endured, her bones spoke truth—just a girl, once of flesh, stardusted dreams and ocean night breezes. Now, just a corpse—brittle bones and barely healed cracks.
Death touched her gently, kindly, lovely. Held her sweetly, calmly, reverently. For bones told no lies, as flesh so oft did. Her bones were just a girl, loved by death and no one at all.
Death dressed her beauty—
Stuffed her ribs with flowers soft, petals silk,
Crowned her head with morning glories,
Filled her heart with roses pink and roses white,
Painted her body in blues and greens, white and red.
Pink—soft like flesh—
And orange—heavy like sunlight—
These were the things of which he made her.
For while Life had dressed her cruelly, touched her cruelly, loved her cruelly.
Death would call her sweet, touch her tender, love irrevocably.
Life had given her away, flung to waves of far seas.
Death clutched her precious, a pearl in his chest of treasures: she was butterflies and sunshine, honey milk and dew drops, cloudy skies and lamplit streets.
Life had given her away and Death had laid his claim.
What she was once, she would never be again—
For now she was his.