Couldn’t life have changed when she knocked on your door?
Of course it could have.
But did it?
No.

Leaning heads on coldly bolted iron, the barricades of your heart she sighed to herself and tasted her doom in the ridges of her mouth.
Perhaps if her tongue wasn’t so dry.
Perhaps if she could learn how to cry.

The devastation of a Sunday afternoon pooled at her feet like menstrual blood.
Crisply dry, slickly wet.
Moisture of childhoods loss; climbs in trees with rickety cottages.

And at the end of her life’s street stands your house –Stood your house.
Because it’s not your house anymore.
It’s the house of sin.
Of loss.
Of pain.

And at that time of day when the sun isn’t a ball rolling down the street, she stood with her slick palms resting against the wood of your door.
Warm and wet.
Cold sweat.

The shivers of an undead past haunting her spine will push her so hard against the wall your breath will be the wind of stars on her tired eyelids.
She will weep her hymns and cry her elegies of darkness behind drawn curtains of lashes.

Your religion is her law, your god her father.
Kiss the ground she treads; never has anyone loved so much ugliness.

Of course, there was no way you were ever going to open that door. But there she stood. With her very being quivering under your curtain-doomed gaze. Your hands by the sill of those tightly shut windows, she could never dare raise her eyes.

Obsessive caresses

Successive
golden tresses

One nightmare after another flies across her eyes;
her days into her nights
—sliding between your closely shut thighs

Could you never have opened that door…
Cause you stranded her on that unwashed shore
The pavement has never been a good place to die

Perhaps you should have just asked her why.