Buttery and the shade of melted umber, she shines like burnished stone. I could look for hours and not see a sliver, barely a fractional vista caught in the horizon’s shimmer. Sharp in the way of absent notes in a felonious composition, her cadences carry a piano’s punctuation. I could listen for hours and not catch a word, simply drift upon a lilting cloud of consciousness. Marshmallows soaked in cocoa, her eyes are diaphanous chocolate portals flecked with gold. I could drown in their depths and be forever quenched. Boundless and scaled to suit, her love is tailor made.
I simply stood there and took it, worse, I thought it was right, allowing myself to be moulded by the doctrines of others. A malleable man sculpted by amateur artisans without vision or talent, I stood as a terracotta warrior, seeing myself as stoic but bound by stilted strictures scribbled on scrap and shoved carelessly into my head. Full of silt I called grit, glazed eyes and a burnished countenance, I was proud of my shape and ignored my counterintuitive commands and crumbling base, not yet understanding how to saw off my shackles, nor even see them as such.
A Few Short Words 