the queen may be dead but she was never truly alive to begin with.

i hang my head at the gallows and watch as the

rose-colored parade passes me by. the gleaming traitors, all shuffling off to die.

at the funeral i feel no dizzying sense of grief. she was never that good to me,

i say in that distant sort of way, like my head is looking at the window at some

beautiful scene you'll never know. i'll tell you later in the car and you'll term my

reaction subpar.

everything piles on top of everything else. i become a slave to permanence and health

and i chase the idea of wealth, fleeting. it's just like everything else though, it's here so

fast and then it's leaving. people tell me that you only go this high, honey, that you peak.

and here i was, the specimen of the weak, putting my wings to the wind for the first

real time there ever was. i could try to fly, i knew, but it wouldn't be for much.
my mouth for the meek. there is a pillar of salt in my bed where my body used to be. i wondered,

when she went to look back, what did she ever see?

the queen may be dead, but her ghost still visits. these days, i have myself. you and i inhabit different continents.

when i see her smiling in the mirror as i shave, i ask her what it was like to have been so brave.

she answers with that impish grin, the one everybody rushed to bask in

"i fought and i fought and i fought and i kept going but nobody had told me i lost."

that's it, i decide. nobody will have the same thoughts once i've died. and she and i

together in the rafters we are silent and together we lie.

whatever goes in my body, stays in my body. - words sprayed on the side of the temple

and it was painful to realize the sentiment that applied to me.

it's so easy to say things and not mean them. words are transparencies to be held

against the light of time. it will shine so bright and then it will vanish into the

cruel illusion that is the night, because morning always has to come.

i will be left defenseless, so i'll jump to anything. i will run. the creatively-inclined may paint

or sing but i tear myself to pieces, the hatred that reverberates from my belly.

i cradle the flames in me that engulfed our unity. i do not eat or sleep for days.

is it better to invade misery together, or to keep it alone? the queen...

she is not all that i have, but she will find me when i am facedown in the street

bottomless in the trenches of my own grief, asking me what was the incentive to fight? and

you will be on the other line of that phone, calling me from some far away home

that i may never see, so my answer will come in the form of a seabound haze

i have no real purpose, i have no wife. i have no family of my own, this is why i write.