She's just a bowl of plums
in this decrepit apple orchard
that bears more roots than gnarled fruits
to shrivel up and crumble into
dust beneath the gravestones of
star shadows and eternal twilight.

Sweet, ripe, religiously indifferent
as she hides between the hollows,
shallow skin stretched across juicy skeleton;
gleaming violet blue black,
hiding behind her hair as she rises
bare and beautiful,
deliciously vindictive in the in-between,
the almost would be never was.

All these fruitless altercations culminating
in climactic separations, repercussions
walking barefoot among broken stone
just unsharp enough to bruise her bones
so scarred and cracked and healed
but never broken, never ruined beyond repair,
crushed and maimed and crippled but
still somewhat alive.

So she dons a cloak of moonlight
to bleach the roses from cheeks
flamed of shame and compromise,
cool skin slipping into stony silence
as her voice withers into discord,
apple orange comparisons she has no stake in;
she wants liberty and recklessness,
acid flowing in her veins to give her fire,
give her passion, give her lust,
give her everything she's not allowed to be.

It's all perfection, deception growing
from the seeds interred between her toes
until it branches through her fingernails,
flutters between eyelashes so sweeping as to
lull the trees into complacency
inside her arms.

Glaring independence forced upon her
lovely barren shoulders,
lithe enticement bearing witness to
her self-sufficient blunders as she
waits away, wastes away
in the sterile starkness,
enabled inabilities stifling
stilled lips that mouth…

"Bite me."