A/N: The reason this is in the poetry, comes at the end.

Hush little baby…

Hands passing across the days, not memories, or journeys, or time lost, but the days.

It’s a fascination of her’s, and when she reads to pallid skin,—it’s fading, and if those same fingers ticked to the left she would still notice the transparency. He wasn’t going to die, but be grinded by those imaginary fibers that always told her how little he had left—reads to thinning hair, she thinks that in all truth it has no right to be more lackluster than hers. No right to be more lifeless. She strokes one more glossy page, strokes the day when he looked like all the other two legged creatures that climbed her tree, that knocked on her door and brought him crystallized sugar dyed the colours he could no longer peek out to see.

Yet, if you interrogated her long enough, between pearly, patient, teeth would slither words you never thought to hear. She thought he was pathetic. You see, he’s so complacent, she would tell you, and having no will, no ambition is a sin. Pity, it’s what helps her to dip the cloth into warmth and place it on his head, pity is what brings the bowl when his body rejects him and anything else, pity is what keeps him alive. He always did like pity after all, and there were times when she peered at him there he was someone older, some changeling of a being staring back. The changeling was the type never to take the things thrusted upon him; she fell in love with him.

Don’t you cry…

It no longer opens its eyes. And it is this that she lives for, what she wants to keep him for, because if she dug beneath nondescript brown there lies something that she reveres—minutes are swallowed by hours, minutes spent wondering if she can rip him open and look in. Dig through everyday scraps of skin, and see this…being that dashes through plasma, skirts across marrow, nestles deep. She knows it’s the kind to get milk stains while picking weedy sunshine out in the field, she can glimpse—when it’s gaze scratches through the monotonous pupils of her son’s—how much it would chase esteem. Those satisfied with what they have—knowledge only gets you so far—never move in life after all they cannot see.

So as she glances out the window, she begins mumbling to him, how, the thing that thrives inside his dissipating body would love her. Would be her allegorical David, fight her demons, ward off Goliath and she would hold it when it rained, she would cover its ears from the cacophony that the envious vermin would make. Sniffling, she recognizes the sickly tang of his perspiration, she hasn’t bathed him as yet, and the day is lethargically sagging into night. Encompassing his frail bulk in her arms, she begins walking to the door, her focus reverts to the floor for one moment, and it there that she sees a glint of metal. Dismissing it she tells herself, perhaps tomorrow—tomorrow promises no one, it exists under the premise of forever—fills the bath, and tenderly (a mother’s love—pity—is a boy’s best friend) rests him in. Scrubbing, and all its rigors, begins, all the while speculating if she scrubs off enough of this skin, all of this stench, all of this disappointment, will he transcend, because sweetheart, evanescence is where she wants him. Knowledge only gets you so far, but intuition is born from something indomitable; she scrubs so hard that his eyes stir, dull brown opening.

Mama’s gonna sing you a lullaby…

The changeling gazes back,

Blinks at the flurry of her white stained tub

Amongst the engaging decorative rust

(Evidence of his indolence, it’s all his self-satisfied nature) and smiles.

Crawling its way through malignancy, it sinks into his larynx

Makes it its own.

Devour it and its yours, worldly unspoken law; eating tongue, teeth, and palate

It flexes its jaw—

Will Mama’s little iniquity play a game of follow the leader?

Nods in agreement, then does as he’s told.

--

Mama’s left soap trails to the forgiveness that lies on the floor

—She lives for today exclusively—

Ginning as it stares down the 9 mm hole (eyes the shade of lackluster brown)

Because bravery never shivers;

He asks in a voice that belongs to it—the David—

Mama, free me (yourself).

It is the way he wants it transpire,

With the bullet, not the woman pretending to be mother,

Kissing his salted forehead.

And the changeling laughs at the embryo on the tiles

They used to call it a woman,

She fell into her own depravity—complacency is a sin (but he always loved pity).

--

Pick him apart, the changeling mocks, and you’ll never find me.

A/N:Thank you all who have and will review.