She did everything right
They remember her wrong
Hand in hand, we would walk
But skin could never block the talk
To pull her from all familiarity,
stripped of warm arms in winter,
and throw her naked, exposed, shivering,
into the antagonistic streets of social construct
Then expect her to learn,
to melt, to turn herself inside out,
adopt the very vernacular that invoked
a metallic taste on her tongue as she bit it
Can you forgive old and frail and scared?
Can you see the hand on my shoulder with its
nails that dig in, can you see that it doesn’t pinch,
that it holds me up, the sharp pain of her single-faceted love?
They refuse to yield
a kind word, nor a question, just
definitive rejection, because pursuit of truth
only applies to language they can understand
It is Judgement Day, the last straw
And I am to choose the life she continues
There is fight in her, she has a bone to pick with Death, but
every minute has been a battle. Her eyes have never learned to close.
We’ll light her up until everything but memory is ashes.
And the memory will forever burn untrue, until one day it
departs once and for all, and she won’t feel the guilt
She won’t feel anything at all