as we tried to empty ourselves
so we would feel nothing
don’t tell me that hurts less than a broken bone
that an ingrown life
is something surgeons can cut away
that there’s no way for it to metastasize
it does
Into the last good fight I'll ever know.
Live and die on this day.
Live and die on this day.
Vincent Malloy is seven years
old,
He's always polite and does what he's told.
For a boy his age he's
considerate and nice,
But he wants to be just like Vincent Price.
He doesn't mind living
with his sister, dog and cat,
Though he'd rather share a home with spiders and bats.
There he could reflect on the
horrors he's invented,
And wander dark hallways alone and tormented.
Vincent is nice when his aunt
comes to see him,
But imagines dipping her in wax for his wax museum.
He likes to experiment on his
dog Abacrombie,
In the hopes of creating a horrible zombie.
So he and his horrible zombie
dog,
Could go searching for victims in the London fog.
His thoughts aren't only
of ghoulish crime,
He likes to paint and read to pass the time.
While other kids read books
like Go Jane Go,
Vincent's favorite author is Edgar Allen Poe.
One night while reading a
gruesome tale,
He read a passage that made him turn pale.
Such horrible news he could
not survive,
For his beautiful wife had been buried alive.
He dug out her grave to make
sure she was dead,
Unaware that her grave was his mother's flower bed.
His mother sent Vincent off
to his room,
He knew he'd been banished to the tower of doom.
Where he was sentenced to
spend the rest of his life,
Alone with a portrait of his beautiful wife.
While alone and insane,
encased in his tomb,
Vincent's mother suddenly burst into the room.
"If you want to you can
go outside and play.
It's sunny outside and a beautiful day."
Vincent tried to talk, but he
just couldn't speak,
The years of isolation had made him quite weak.
So he took out some paper,
and scrawled with a pen,
"I am possessed by this house, and can never leave it
again."
His mother said,
"You're not possessed, and you're not almost
dead.
These games that you play are all in your head.
You're not Vincent Price,
you're Vincent Malloy.
You're not tormented, you're just a young
boy."
"You're seven years
old, and you're my son,
I want you to get outside and have some real fun."
Her anger now spent, she
walked out through the hall,
While Vincent backed slowly against the wall.
The room started to sway, to
shiver and creak.
His horrid insanity had reached its peak.
He saw Abacrombie his zombie
slave,
And heard his wife call from beyond the grave.
She spoke from her coffin,
and made ghoulish demands.
While through cracking walls reached skeleton hands.
Every horror in his life that
had crept through his dreams,
Swept his mad laugh to terrified screams.
To escape the madness, he reached for the door,
So he and his horrible zombie
dog,
But fell limp and lifeless down on the floor.
His voice was soft and very
slow,
As he quoted The Raven from Edgar Allen Poe,
"And my soul from out
that shadow floating on the floor,
Shall be lifted--Nevermore!"
She paints a pretty picture,
But the story has a twist,
Her paint brush is a razor
And her canvas is her wrist,
She paints her pretty picture
In a color that's blood red
While using her sharp pain brush
She ends up finally dead
Her pretty pictures fading
Quite slowly on her arm
The blood is not racing through her
She can no longer do harm
She painted her pretty picture
But her picture had a twist
You see her mind was her razor
And her heart was her wrist.
maybe your words will grow up to be a gymnasts
maybe you have been kicking people with them by accident I know some people get a whole lot of rocking in the rocking chair
and the ones who don’t sometimes get rocks in their voice boxes,
and their voice boxes become slingshots.
maybe you think my heart looks like a baby squirrel. but you absolutely missed when you told the class I have head lice
‘cause I one hundred percent absolutely do not have head lice
and even if I do
it is a fact that head lice prefer clean heads over dirty ones
so I am clean as a whistle on a tea pot.
my mother says it is totally fine if I blow off steam
as long as i speak in an octave my kindness can still reach. my kindness knows mermaids never ever miss their legs in the water
‘cause there are better ways to move through the ocean than kicking. so guess what,
if I ever have my own team
I am picking everyone first even the worst kid
and the kid with the stutter like a skipping record
‘cause I know all of us are scratched,
even if you can’t hear it when we speak.
my mother says most people have heartbeats
that are knocking on doors that will never open,
and I know my heart is a broken freezer chest
‘cause I can never keep anything frozen. so no, I am not “always crying.”
I am just thawing outside of the lines.
and even if I am “always crying”
it is a fact
that salt is the only reason
everything floats so good in the dead sea.
and just ‘cause no one ever passes notes to me
doesn’t mean I am not super duper.
in fact, my super duper might be a buoy or a paper boat
the next time your nose gets stuck up the river
‘cause it is a fact
that our hearts stop every for a mili-second every time we sneeze
and some people’s houses have too much dust. some people’s fathers are like attics
I’ve heard attics have monsters in their walls and shaky stares.
I think if I lived in a house with attic
I’d nightmare a burglar in my safety chest
and maybe I’d look for rest in the sticks and stones
‘cause my mother says a person can only swallow so much punch
before he’s drunk on his own fist but the only drunk I ever knew
was sleeping in the alley behind our church
and jesus turned water into his wine
so even god has his bad days but on your bad days couldn’t you just say
“hey I’m having a bad day,”
instead of telling me I’m stupid or poor,
or telling me I dress like a boy
‘cause maybe I am a boy AND a girl
maybe my name is Andrea Andrew.
so what.
it is a fact that bumblebees have hair on their eyes
and humans, also, should comb though everything they see. like
an anchorman is not a sailor.
like the clouds might be a pillow fight.
like my mother says,
“every bird perched on a telephone wire
will listen to the conversations running through its feet
to decide the direction of its flight.” so I know every word we speak
can make hurricanes in people’s weather veins
or shine their shiny shine so maybe sometime you could sit beside me on the bus
and I could say,
“guess what, it is a fact that manatees have vocal chords
but do not have ears.
and Beethoven made music
even when he could no longer hear. and I know every belt that has hit someone’s back
is still a belt that was built to hold something up. and it is fact that Egyptians slept on pillows made of stone
but it’s not hard for me to dream
that maybe one day you’ll write me back
like the day I wrote the lightening bug to say,
I smashed my mason jar and I threw away the lid.
I didn’t want to take a chance that I’d grow up to be a war. I want to be a belly dance or an accordion or a pogo stick
or the fingerprints the mason left
in the mortar between the bricks
to prove that he was here,
that he built a roof over someone’s head
to keep the storm from their faith,
my mother says that’s why we all were born. and I think she’s right.
so write back soon.
sincerely yours.
