Blackbird Memory Letters 5

Dearest Blackbird,
How did May already get here? I thought April would swallow me and never let me go. Instead it put me on trial and gave me a white tulip verdict. After all those dried roses in glass bottles...There was a crash as the glass hit the pavement. No one was there to hear it. In the morning they walked past and never thought twice about the ground they trampled.
They're telling me to forget. To shut down my mind and duck my head and just get through the day. They don't believe me when I tell them there's more to this than what they see. My mind has no gender, no race, no age, no form. It is merely trapped in a body which possesses each of these features. I want to rip off my skin sometimes. Pull out my hair and slash through my curves so they stop staring at them and look me in the eye. Some shadows were meant to be taken off the page. Some wrists meant to be cut as if all that really mattered was digging out the malignant pit, a bone buried underneath. The veins and arteries could be twisted up and glued back together later. That was the plan at least. The skin there always looked so vulnerable, blue streams could be seen gliding just beneath the surface. It was like watching a disease take control over the body. It was fascinating. My shoulders shook. My skin grew transparent. I kept touching my elbows and wrists as if to see they were still there. Squeezing them to feel a pulse. Rubbing them with ice to cool the blood. I was an addict without a drug. Searching in vain for indifference.
In the silence that abandoned us we found a key to the feathers life gave us long ago when the world was ending and we were the only ones left to put it back together. I tremble because I hear the words so clearly now, languages I never understood are sending me messages too late. I crack the bottles over my head and collapse at the foot of a wave. Silver boomerangs spin through my peripheral vision, blades I want to duck away from, but can't. Beats fade. Shadows lengthen. I try not to think about the flowers I left on the window sill in a house I will never return to or the butterflies I never let out of their jars. We're wanderers sometimes, who get trapped on a circular path. Bricks passed over so often they turn into red chalk. Worship is a figure of speech. It floats in the conversation but never really sinks in. Tying clouds down is nearly impossible. But we did it once. It squirmed in the net and lashed out with static energy and sprays of water. It made such a mess. We took out the vacuum and took it all away. To squint. To cringe. To open up and say we lost another one.
Blackbird....
Hush my darling words will keep, slip away in endless sleep, if one day you should wake, It will be my soul you take.