a heavily decorated door creaks open to disturb the silence-
"why don't you turn on the light?" he asks her,
but she likes the shape of the night;
the way the sky hugs close to the earth and resembles the bell of a glass cover over a cake on a bakery counter.
"life is sweet like that..." she sings,
"like a pastry on display,
something sweet that we can taste."
there's a certain way of looking at it.
your eyes half closed,
one hand high on a hip and the other clasping a cigarette.
"yeah,
i mean,
i guess that makes sense..."

"one ******* roll!"
of the drum,
of a car,
of our calendar.
things have changed.
the universe is stretching,
the earth has grown;
and so has she,
into a species of flower that can't be grown indoors no matter how many lamps you point at her face-
she needs the sun...
and the wild.
let her grow free in the sun of foreign hillsides,
by a creek in the meadow she's dreamt of for years...
with the fruit farms.
"yeah...the fruit farms." she smiles.
she's always wanted to sell fruit on the highway a few miles from the farm she'll own,
on land she bought,
in a house she built,
feasting daily upon earthly treasures she grew
in the dirt
with her hands.
let her feed you a story for breakfast;
a picture she'll paint with scenes of her dreams that she only occasionally shares...
when the mood is hopeful and kind and she's not worried about anyone laughing.
listen to her heart;
type-writer keys over the hum of radio space.
rest your head-
ear pressed to her chest;
listen.
like curious neighbors in the backyard in the sleepy hours of the weekend between breakfast and lunch,
coffee and cartoons.
let her show you one of her dreams.
a prized,
***** pebble she keeps cradled in a pocket full of lint.
she's an old soul...
peering through dirt colored eyes just as wide as a child's.

"it's been a long time since i've seen the ocean..."
she whispers to herself under the last drag of her third cigarette.

but she hates the beach,
and the crowds of the vain who gather there to worship starving,
sacred bodies;
she just likes the sound.
the throaty yell of prehistoric waves breaking over zagging shorelines.
she says the sound "helps her dream."
it doesn't "help" her dream,
nothing helps her sleep...
it just makes her think;
of unimaginable beasts that have swam in our seas,
and the shape she's been told that the continents once made.
she thinks of mer-maids and voyagers and the rustic ship that brought her great-grandmother over at age thirteen...
this time she's not dreaming,
just remembering things that she's never seen.
her ***** feet need a stroll through the sands of a pristine scene-
she's heard such thing used to exist.

she mumbles, "it hurts to know that nothing is sacred..."

but she is.
a mess of tangled heart-strings and sentences,
she's sacred.
and so are the four tiny walls that hide her from the world.