Frightened little boys are lost in harsh, grating laughter the color of bloodstained gold. Consciousness is a lie and nightmares are easily interchanged with reality. Confusion and panic are secret promises easily hidden by honeyed words and half-hearted self reassurances. The blinding yellow of street lights is an elaborate trap and dreams and triangles are hidden demons in search of prey.
The easily spoken "I'm fine's" build walls around guilty little girls. They make it all too easy to hide the blood drip, drip, dripping down fingers in the single stalled gas station bathroom. Razor blades leave bloody kisses when they dance across scarred skin. Pain means relief and punishment because it's your fault, your fault, your fault. The kitchen scissors go missing again, and the constant stream of stationary sweaters hints at where they've gone.
The word "home" loses its meaning to guilty old men. Home is the weight of too much nothing, a stolen shack, an old beat up car, everything that once was. Home is hunched over numbers in a hidden basement, a shack that belongs to someone else, impenetrable guilt, alone again.
Sanity is a single, fraying thread to which little boys and little girls and old men cling. Sanity means pills dry swallowed in the dead of night so that hidden eyes can't watch as they fall apart. Sanity means connections that are as fragile as pipe dreams and brushed away as easily as smoke. Sanity means wearing dreams their minds like straight jackets in silence because struggles are meant to be taken on alone. Sanity means convincing themselves the single eye following their every movement is simply imagination.
