Yesterday they lined up all the boys to give them a good talking to.
After all, when you're about to ask the head priest's daughter for her hand, you must do it the right way.

But of course, they'd only line up the boys, and not the girls who glance and flirt and trail the tips of their fingers along wet gowns when bathing.
It's known that Victoria will kiss anyone who can tame her curls, and Alice leaves violets for those she fancies.
Even a pig recognize that Jacob and Peter have been making eyes at each other for about two summers, and that Matti only longs for books.
Harold's true love is venison, and though he could be won over digestively, Emi is really trying to move towards vegetarianism.

So they told the boys how to carry themselves and some listened in desperate eagerness and earnest and a few planned pranks, and anyone worth their salt could tell it was a disaster.
This morning, the local girls dressed the boys in flowers, as is strange tradition, but then a few joined the line and fairly glowed in their blue linen and lemony cinnamon licorice hair, dripping with petals.

The king laughed and the head priest smirked in bemusement, as it is every year.
And Emi gazed, bored and silent to every proclamation, gift, and oath.
Yet a fourth year had passed without a chosen suitor.
Courtyard emptied, and I drew near her chair as well.

"I have no strange and beautiful art to exhibit or exotic sweet to taste. I do not seek what you will not eagerly give, and I will not ask you to be my wife, but I'd very much like to be your friend ifthatwouldbeokaywithyouthanks."

After all, who doesn't fall in love with Artemis.

I am an onion.
Peel me.
Cry, too, through the smiles and grief and tight resistance to vulnerability that are held out to you.
Wonder at the resilient fragility of each syn-propanethial-S-oxide drowning layer.
Let me **** forward and grab you, in my death.
Hold our faces close, inhale your breath and roughly slip back.
Gently husk away the dull layers of dermis and cradle the papery lairs that fall faster and faster as I relax
rigor-less, into your arm,
and fall
and fall
and fall
apart.

L--- is the thick, adrenaline-wrought catharsis of a summer rainstorm on the highway at night.
It's the ridiculously advantaged team in a game of dodgeball;
and the hail in March as you run from work to close your car's skylight;
and the wave that rakes your hair with the teeth of the sand and surf;
and the pebble on the downhill ***** that your bike trips over and you fly off, eyes wide and gracelessly flailing;
and L--- is the way you lose yourself in the cosmic threads of their eyes;
and the breath you forgot you were holding.

You've asked me why I love you
As if you couldn't believe I would love you
But how could I not love you?

For thousands of years we have found ways of writing on the wall
Much of it concerning bragadocious claims

I've grown weary of this road and the cyclical path I follow,
yet I know that to make this road my bed would be to make it my grave.
Too long I've slumped forward, like a satellite in low orbit; forever falling down but never quite reaching The Place Where Down Stops.
All I need is one flare, one burst of flame
away from the stale air of an old house and musty earth
and to propel what passes for a spaceship into fresh, verdant land.

I've outlined the necessities, which you'll find on page four of the agenda.
Our itinerary is scrawled somewhere between the receipt for my breakfast and my dry cleaning,
and don't worry if a leaf or two falls out.

You are the sea in my mouth and storm in my ears,
pushing the warm dark clouds of night around me and rasping, fairly dragging your winds along my throat.
I am the earth beneath you, letting you knead and wind around me.
Swallowed into the endless galaxies and dark holes of your eyes,
You devour me, and my hunger grows the more you give me.
You, the forces of nature, and I, the waiting earth.
Nothing alike, and yet each complements the other, and you fill my dreams with emotion and solidity and distance.