The scars on the moon were there for all to see,

Wounds cut deeper than any wound should be.

I don't need a lens to see her savaged form,

I see it in the way she looks at me.

One day, I will leave this world.
The energy that pumps through me will dissipate;
The body I know will begin to rot and decay;
The thoughts and emotions I feel now,
with great urgency and severity,
gone.

The people I love will put me in the ground,
to cover the stench of my rotting corpse;
They will visit 'me' once a year with obligatory tears in their eyes.
They will auction off all of my personal belongings,
All the things I cherished and valued;
To look upon them will be 'too much'.

Slowly I will fade from their memories:
My personality;
My laugh;
My smile;
The way I held my face when I was concentrating really hard.
All the little things that make me me, forgotten;
Like I never existed at all.

In their loneliest moments, perhaps, they will remember me.
Not the real me, of course;
Just my name attached to a sort of vague concept of death,
An idea of what it is to no longer exist;
My memory will serve to give them a sense of their own mortality;
An occasionally present reminder that they too, one day, will die.

sometimes i think
that if, perhaps,
i could shrink myself down into something a bit more beautiful,
then maybe you would love me.

in the ugly, unafraid, truth-telling part of my mind,
the part i seldom dare to visit,
i know this is not true,
know that you could never love me,
not now.

i can make myself,
as much as i like,
into wood to be whittled,
but i cannot make you crave those carvings.

you can lead a horse to water,
or whatever it is that they say.

but i fear i will always be a well run dry in your eyes
(or perhaps one that never had water to begin with).

so i combat this fear in the only way i know how:
by turning away from it,
pretending it does not exist.

by shrinking.

and sometimes,
sometimes,
when you don't seem as far away,
i think that if, perhaps,
i could shrink myself down into something a bit more beautiful,
then maybe you would love me.

(a.m.)