Stonehead

They all fall away.

Gray rocks chopped from a mountain face, grinning, glaring, whispering amongst themselves. They think the blue sky is too cold to have ears to stone.

The next layer is a glass peel, like you’d wrap around a damsel to keep her fresh amidst the phallic corn cobs while you heat the red plastic gobbledygook sauce in a lab full of sun starved of light.

She all falls away.

Inside there are heavy, sticky things, sick honey gluing pebbles in the shape of hovels where hearts hide, extending mucus threads to trap tiny morsels to stab with their mandibles that once were thoughts, supposedly, in me.

Nothing is left.

Time mudslides in from above, a shovelful of what other healthy intestines rejected, stinking of twitching insects and undigested seeds that will never grow in this soft ground in this cheap vacant lot. Time pierces out from within, a 12-hour impalement that retracts only to rise with the next dark day, the sharp breaths of a dying living thing.

It all falls away,

in a storybook open to fortress around a half-shaded face eating cereal reading a story of a boy who trained a dragon to rip the princess’s heart open and free his older brother so they could live forever in Never Land in the clear blue eyes that skim left to right in the cereal sugar I taste my language so I keep going, certain that one of these days or steps or breaths it all falls away.

Nothing

is left.

Image credits in order of appearance:

By Damien Hirst (From stuckism.com Photo by Charles Thomson.) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

This Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons image is from the user Chris 73 and is freely available at //commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Raven_scavenging_on_a_dead_shark.jpg under the creative commons cc-by-sa 3.0 license.