Late in the evening, the child takes off her reading glasses
And lays on the glass floor with blurry sight and an open reality.
While her textbooks blaze their myths
in the hearthside under the black coals,
By the window is a telescope
with a scratched up mirror, the knobs can’t be adjusted.

On the table are her laminated note cards
with trivial knowledge written
in fancy cursive.

The cards slip from the countertop and drift unto dust clouds.

That is suspended in a broken imagination.
Her handwriting sits on top of weightless ambitions
and sinks through the melting mesh net.

Cough syrup puddles pollute the kitchen sink,
purple pools of empty dreams.

Undercooked food for her thought
is smoking in the oven,
but she knows the smoke will clear soon;
all that is needed is time, time and space.

Everything that matters gets clogged
up in the sink’s drain, her thoughts,
and her sanity.

She once believed she had a connection with God,
but that illusion
Left her with a soggy tissue box
just like her high-school sweetheart.
Nicholas Sparks’s novels are the bottomless hole,
which she jumps into
each night, not even pretending to trip over the ledge.

The grandfather clock laughs with her
and doesn’t act his age,
Right below him sitting on a plush pedestal
is Breakfast at Tiffany’s,
The novel not the movie.
It sits upright with its legs crossed just as a lady would,

Black sunglasses to correct her eyesight
when everything collapses in a man’s world.

The stardust on the windowsill eats
through her emotional doll house, she
Yearns for a thrill like getting hit
by a chloroform dart in her breast. She desperately

wants an intoxicating heart sickness.
Wine glasses stand in line patiently
Waiting for her to fill them up
and then swallow their anxiousness away.

She thinks of her bubbly mother
who smiles while her Dad beats her.
But every evening, she ties an apron around her waist,
turns the chicken broth stew into escape from perfection.
She uses a wooden ladle,
but longed for a silver spoon

When all she had were Vogue magazines and the black and white pictures.

The girl get up from the carpet floor,
and leans over her half-opened window.
Outside the fireflies battle the moths
for the attention of a dying lamppost.
As the flame is cremated, a street-smart ***
rolls down the street in his shopping cart,

Steering the cart with the negative weight of newspapers.
The girl lies back down

And her lighter flickers
under a torn page of a child’s diary, she twirls around
Her spectacles searching for a woman in the reflection.
But she can’t see anything

human, just an animal
who lusts for a world that exists only in Tinsel Town.

Thoughts of waiting tables in the evening
and casting calls in the morning.
Another girl who wants to be a golden star
that never shines underneath a concrete sidewalk