Chameleon.

All your colours, mutating just under the surface – they’re so hard to predict. I see blue pushing over veins, crawling over the bones of your face, creeping under the first layer of skin, lifting and shape-shifting, poking fun at my inability to read you. You look so different, when you change like that.

The asperity of truth a mangled interpretation of chrominance, the saturation and hue a sliding scale of reality, the red flushing your hands is burning, hot – the red, it makes me shy away from your touch, makes me think that burn is designed for my cheek.

The comity of us is interrupted by the green spilling into your eyes, biting and sharp like razor teeth ripping through soft belly, pulling sinewy guts from the pit of an empty stomach, nothing but shredded muscularis dripping liquid unease.

Up your arms like a vine crawls a black as deep as winter night. It seeps out pores, soaks into the thin fabric of shirt, stains you like oil. The ornamental colour hides you in the background, manipulates until it matches the flower-pattered gaudy wallpaper pasted up five decades ago by a small sad woman with too much time, too little satisfaction and a budget to blow on furnishing fulfillment in a well-decorated home. Your ephemeral colour, it’s as muddy as her reason for choosing the valium pattern in the first place.

Reclined comfortably amongst these colours lies you: the bones and teeth and flesh of you, the waste and acid and germs of you, the boring and simple and plain colour of you – the less drastic, less shocking, less impressive you.

The languid charm of your shifting state enervates the need to know you, the real you, the you who picks your nose and drools on your pillow and squirms when speaking in public; the you who bites your nails and stutters when angry and cries when watching long distance telephone commercials; the you who sneaks through the drive through late at night for two cheeseburgers and scratches your scalp despite the flakes and skips showering in favour of sleep.

The you no one else sees.

xoxo

M. L. H’art

Brave Face.

If your heart broke tomorrow, I’d turn down the blinds and pour you a stiff drink, hand you the controller and let you play until your frustrations were reduced to pixels of blood and fantasy. I’d not even block your end sequence so you’d feel good about the up, down, left, left, roundhouse combination that tore off my character’s arm and slapped it to the floor.

I’d not remind you the bills had to be paid and the garbage had to be taken out or that we had company coming tomorrow because I’d do everything I could to stop you from crying; when the clouds broke open and brought down the rain I’d tell you it was Mother Nature sharing her sympathy and I’d invite you to sit up late to see the moon roll over the night while you thought about how things could be and I’d tell you how much you mean to me.

I’d not wake you up in the morning to go to work; instead I’d let you sleep the whole day through though I know we’d need the money and I’d make your favourite food for dinner even if it was only mushroom soup from a can.

But you find your brave face in the bathroom mirror every morning and your brave face, it tells me you don’t need me and my little words of encouragement because those words can’t convince you of anything – not of happiness, not of fate, not of life lessons – and so I stop the words and let you walk away, your heart trailing on a kite string behind you in the mud, still breaking, still leaking, still aching.

Your brave face doesn’t believe me when I tell it I’d do just about anything for you – even scare away the birds on the balcony or take out the butt bottles without complaining – and your brave face tells me to go away, to push off, to get lost because your face doesn’t need help from someone like me, someone who doesn’t know about real love and real pain and real sacrifice.

I wish I could borrow your brave face sometimes like when I borrow your black skirt with the ruffles that makes me feel like a career woman in an old VHS who conquers the business world with wit and a stern look in her eye. My face, the one I find smeared across the pillow case every morning, it’s squishier, the bones weaker – it needs your words sometimes, even if you don’t have them to give.

Did you hear me when I told you you don’t ever know newness without ripping through the memory first? If I could pluck the words out of the air with those rusting tweezers under the bathroom sink, I’d plug them right into your ear so they’d get stuck like the chorus from the song on the radio you hate even though it’s catchy and the same four lines run around your head every time you hear it, so you’d sing those eleven words again and again and again.

But I worry you wouldn’t let me close enough to get them into your ear, past the wax and pride and dug deep enough into your mind you’d remember I only want to help.

xoxo

M.L. H’art

The Late Night.

We used to play here in this parking lot, pretending to be super heroes. Remember? My cape, it was shiny blue and gave me powers. We’d play, you and me; I’d run bare foot across the pavement, jump at you trusting you to catch me mid-air, twirl me, make me fly.

We’d battle, epic blow after blow – pow, take that, aha! Zounds, foiled again – minor bruises from a major storyline unfolding in front of the late night, the moon a witness to our silly game of pretend.

A whisper of wind, light laughter, the shake of rustling leaves let through the window screen, the only negativity caught by the net of the dreamweaver.

But the game, the sounds – they’re changing.

Deep base, monotonous thumping, speaker boxes competing with loudmouths, profanity reaching sticky fingers above drunken nonsense notes, choking the late night until its breath is interrupted, until it wakes with a start and charges up out of bed.

Watching over a parking lot filled with the uncertainty of an uneven energy, the late night remembers when I showed you my super strength, but shakes a sad head at the moral panic of the selfish herd taking up residence in the neighbourhood, pushing out the pretend.

Loud and agitated, the mob moves uncoordinated, its self-seeking behaviour an emulation of anxious rivalry. The night – it prays no one makes the wrong step, says the wrong word.

The mean world, it’s getting meaner and meaner still and the conformism of violence is spreading like an illness. This swarm of people are armed with an insatiable lust for revenge.

One wrong step, one wrong word and the bloodshed of one man spreads across the parking lot washing away the late night fun and laughter we shared with the moon, pretending to be great, pretending we could save the world from sudden danger, pretending the threat of violence was far away, was somewhere else, was not threatening our own backyard because we, we were infinite.

The swarm, it scatters, fear forcing the herd through clogged exits, breaking the geometry of pack mentality, leaving only a few pieces for the cops to pick up. But the cops, the cops don’t get there till the man in the street is nearly dead and the parking lot is almost empty.

My cape? Oh, it’s balled into a blue mass in the back corner of the closet, tucked away from the reality of an unforgiving pavement soaking up the blood of an urban battle without point because, my cape?

My cape tenders no protection here anymore.

xoxo

M.L. H’art

Pathetic Fallacy.

Pregnant clouds angry with the weight of rain, dark and brooding, they say: it’s okay, little girl, you can cry. Waging my pink umbrella against the elements, it’s so easy to blame those wet spots on rain drops. Rubber boots slick with sadness, splashing around in the mucky emotion bubbling up over the curb, I am a kid again, purposely puddle jumping, trying so hard to splash you but instead drenching my new dress with mud stains too tough to get out the first wash through.

I never did appreciate getting covered in mud.

Sadness to madness, emotion creeping up like the blistering sun showing its brave face after the crack of thunder has quieted and the spill of rain has dried up, the pavement a massacring ground of drying-up worms with nowhere to hide, the umbrella and boots fallen soldiers on the lawn, I kick up naked feet and dance, dance, dance in the middle of street.

You never did like it when I danced in the streets.

Madness to maniacal, those feelings become a setting sun desperate to hide behind the horizon, the stars peeking eyes out to spy on long shadows; I hide from you inside those shadows. 1, 2, 3, 4…I hear you counting like you’ll find me hiding in the hall closet.

You never were much good at finding your way around in the dark.

You find me, you always do. You ask me, beg me; pray I speak though you know forcing me to freezes my feet to the ground, causes me to smack dry lips and clear a scratchy throat, paralyzes my vocal chords.

I never did like standing in the spotlight.

As I whisper you lean in close, let my breath tickle your cheek. In and out, I breathe your name and you patiently wait for me to say: it’s okay.

xoxo,

M.L. H’art