plea deal

On the cardboard mat. Sheep mask. A lamplight flickers,

   huzzing and buzzing and

    droning out your 80-degree lies.

Bowed down, bowed out; bruised and hoping for closure,

 your lips part to dribble

  a blood-line that smatters to the floor:

   Please.

   ...Please.

I'll never swallow that pill. And what about you?

          Aged ten on the boardwalk and screaming in solitude, you

kick aside crumpled soda cups and wrapper-foils to breach the sea.

   Your proof of living—a something-something,

   stamped by the ticketer. He lets you on the boatride, where 

your body's been marked, and

          that's my fault, love.

   If there's anything we were born to be,

   perhaps it's blue ink on a black-print exam.

Now think of us, huddled on that rooftop beneath a starless night, where

   daemons of our own chant-ments lifted your veil.

   Incense buried our senses when

you were sold to a blue daze, I recite, I'm sorry.

    We crave those prayers again, demanding what

    was never meant to be theirs,

    but at least, our comfort—

that this was tradition.

We learnt a lesson inscribed

beneath the oil of our ichor,

     entombed into bone-boards, 

     written into shells.

 Too old to remember,

  Too light to be real.

   Too young to carry

a heaviness that weighs a lifetime.

Our heartbeat hits the breaker, circuiting shut at fourteen, and

  we no longer

 know the difference

between faux lust and faux love.

   Boarded shut, 

the sheep head twists, and putrefied brain-slop 

slips down our neck.

It's slaughter. Edible, too—scrawled onto home-made receipts—so let this be the death of a lamb; the death of a god.

   The death of a child—

of you,

of us,

of me.