MERGE

 
Their skin, creamy, smooth and fragile
Their skin a lie, a false promise,
a wolf wearing the skin of a calf
because how can this Milky Way skin hide two nice lungs and one bad heart?

Their skin, so pretty, covered in cotton and gold,
Their skin, so pretty, chamomile and marigold,
so pretty and now fresher and paler than ever.

Their skin immaculate velvet, nice and perfect to lay your lips on once and for good.
Eyes towards the sky and sky in the eyes,
To touch with hands that caress and hit,
with a mouth that laughs, insults and eats everything whole.

a mouth sewed up by deft, frank and used to it fingers.
those same fingers that stitched them up from pelvis to throat on the cold table, preparing us for our last parade to the wooden home.

*

GAPS

 
You remember a scratchy beard,
strong weathered hands pinching your knee,
shitty bread in a shitty car after school.
You remember his body curled up over a shovel
digging the garden for a grave that fills with water
before holding a soft furry body
made thin by illness or old age, never lack of care.
You don’t remember much from him,
mostly absence.
Maybe a few clumsy fatherly embraces, pet names,
canard and belette,
called you duck but perhaps he wasn’t that fond of birds.
as otherwise your name was your sister’s or the dog’s. Hardly yours.
How strange how a father can become a stranger,
not recognizing your car passing by his,
not recognizing you needed a little more.
You remember Mom, her kind eyes, her mouth that smooches cheeks,
mom smells good, has funny hair and funnier clothes.
You’ve always remembered mom,
her mole at the tip of her nose, her damaged teeth she’s just started fixing because she’d rather money fills the kid’s bellies.
Teeth can wait when the kids are now old enough to take care of her.
We remember the little more we craved she always gave us.

*

HAIKU

 
By a single blink
you renounce to the world
for an instant

*

(Featured image from Pexels)