Young Writers Society

she calls me beautiful

With quivering lips and trembling thighs, and
all dressed up in high heels with the stench of hot sherry,
--a lingering taste of metal and sugar,
her melted features held in place by some invisible string;
she calls me beautiful in her singsong voice—
a melody of engineered high-fashion and low self-worth.

She is the greatest portrait;
painted upon with generosity and fierce bravado.
But the canvas is ripped and the colors fading,
the brushes chipped and abandoned.
The seller has sold to the lowest bidder.

Our story;
a story told and retold, but with no change of words;
and the paper is yellow with rotting time,
aged with empty compassion,
the inked words dripping with marked suspense,
but questionable to the point of disdain.

For, there is no secret, no girlish games of trickery here—
no boyish ambition or wandering eye,
no love for the lie or jealousy sly,
no tragedy great or potion of hate,
just two people with minds like ribcages—
each connect but both branch apart.

Oh, but don’t I crave the magical illusion;
with the pretense, a definite faux pas, but who can blame—
of some surreal acceptance
and in reality, just the opposite,
denial in the highest degree.

Aren’t we so bizarre, terribly cliché but horribly unadulterated?
And this love of mine, unsubstantial and sporadic,
depends on my mood and how the Gin molds my fingers,
depends on the time of day and the time of approach.
It could be a smorgasbord of hope or an epitome of failure.

And she calls me beautiful with chipped teeth and a wig of malice,
metaphorically bound to the life of the ordinary--
formalities and normality filling the daily life with a dreaded bore.
I scream with a mouse’s ferocity at the unpleasant truth.

But, for all the faults that mark her existence;
she is still the Isis of my Greece, the Rệve in my Revolution;
and though her voice is shrilled to a painful pitch,
her mismatched eyeliner dripping into a pool of black, tears, and saliva,
she calls me beautiful.