beloved

Each evening mother would sit on the side of
the bed. Her dry hands hovered over your temples like insects,
cold and alien and with your own eyes you saw
frog turning into a prince, a mouthful of
cigarette smoke disappearing into thin air with a
kiss,
a fairy tale.
She told you over and over again how beautiful you were.
Her boy.

In the morning you wished yourself
against the mirror with
half-closed eyes and pursed lips in a pantomime of faces
you ran off with from
the silver screen not quite yet dead, where men
could still hold women
as if they were guns in a lie of emancipated bodies.

and if anything could
be more beautiful

men holding guns as if they were other men
hard and rigid

In dreams you burned buildings and more often than not
you pursued or were
pursued in a half-mad cacophony of fury like a sin
but here, alone, you were
unsure how to inhibit this body,
to own the thing that owned you.

On the way to school, your reflection
lingered in car windows
and glass doors, caught with never accidental glimpse,
head
turned only so
slightly as to
see
but not to be seen until the main gate,
until you let yourself to be drowned in the hysteria of
half formed creatures lingering in the banally final
process of becoming.

_