His eyes were bright blue, like two little oceanic marbles screaming for ice. She wanted his lips all over her, pink pressed against pale peachy flesh, the ferocious softness making her writhe and scream and laugh loudly in his ears. He turned and smiled at her, his eyes lighting up. She blushed for her thoughts. She was young and he was young looking but was an old man, really, who would like to read Joyce curled up in an oversized library chair, weeping over sermons and hating himself for it something fierce that nobody could really explain. She understood. Because of that she couldn’t put into words.

He ran home, never to see the young girl again, and he sat in a cold corner of his room, a window open, letting rain drift onto his face, making it run and hiding his unsure, unsteady tears. He wanted some sort of needle to inject pleasantries into his bloodstream, Love pulsing in his temples, he fell to the floor, and he knew Time was no more, though he could never, never say it because his lips were stuck together like the doors to some ancient temple, and he could feel the sudden burst of history eating up his insides, and he was breaking, breaking apart and spilling onto the floor, seeping deeply into the carpet and into every piece of paper he touched and every wall he looked at.

He was a poet, the Poet, but no one could tell anyone that. He never shared his poetry, he hid into deep drawers and crumpled up amongst paid bills to be thrown away and never again seen, and he wanted his tears to act as his words so someone could see them, but that painful self-doubt hit him squarely in the gut and he never could, he knew.

Dying at age twenty-three was a feat not many accomplished, like the tight-rope walker who made you gasp and cover your eyes as a kid, but the bullet could still hit his temple, and Love lay spattered on the wall along with the blood. His body on the floor, his mind eaten by the darkening abyss of the eternal nothing that the cosmos existed in, and he wondered if he had become some great star or a black hole or just another particle; he didn’t believe in God.

The young girl with the carnal mind read about it the next day and she cried for no reason in the grass, her soft ivory skin turned red with sorrow and she pressed her face to nature, because she felt him in it.

They found his words after they saw his Love. Hidden in deep drawers, and crumpled amongst old bills, they found beauty and they smiled and kissed his cold body, leaving pretty life-prints all over him, arms wrapping around him, but he didn’t touch them back; he found such things distasteful.

They put him in a box in the ground.

They forgot about him.

His words, scribbled in books and in shaking and shattered minds, remained.

She smiled.