A Lone Star Soliloquy Parts 1 & 2

The mirror still holds your reflection, and forgets you are gone…

I stare into a black mirror,

waiting for your reflection.

Its erratic liturgy of buzzes,

each one mistaken for your resurrection,

slowly rotting the last parts of me

still willing to grieve.

The living ask more of the dead

than the dead could ever answer.

And this black mirror—

this blue-lit sepulchre—

summons you back to me:

shows me what was,

and what almost became.

Oh, curse it.

Curse the ghosts entombed

in this digital cemetery. 

Strawberry Fields Forever

The forever sky gleamed above the strawberry field where the young boy played.

Sweet and bright, the strawberries grew beside him.

He crouched to the bushel’s level and held a strawberry carefully within his palm. It was his garden.

And from then on, each morning, he watered the field.

For an entire year, he saved his allowance to buy a slingshot so he could defend the garden from vermin.

He loved and protected all that lived within it. Once, he had nursed a wounded mourning dove until its broken wing could carry it skyward again.

He was blissful there. Within those rows of strawberries, he had built an entire world for himself.

And together, they grew older.

In the evenings, the rows glowed red beneath the ever-setting sun, and he no longer wandered them alone.

But one winter, the permafrost buried itself deep within the earth. When spring returned, only a few strawberries remained.

His struggling family was forced to leave their little country farm.

And so he left too.

Years later, he returned, yearning for what had been taken from him.

But he could not find it.

The city had swallowed the old farm whole. The rodents he once despised were gone. The mourning dove whose broken wing he had mended had long since flown elsewhere. The windmill and scarecrow had vanished. Even the soil he once trampled barefoot had been entombed beneath concrete.

For months, he wandered, trying to remember where the strawberry fields had once stood.

But he could not find them.

And beneath the forever sky, at a lonely city bus stop, he waited for the strawberry fields to return.