By the Dead Purple Lady
​Published in the May 2019 issue of The Write Launch Literary Magazine
poetry
​
​You could no more take
the green from grass
or take the dark from night

than you could take
the purple from the
dead lady you made me touch

her unbothered hands
sincere in their end.
There is no such thing

as funerals
for children in a world in which
adults are consumed by the denial

of faeries in their tales
so full up on misconceptions about
the nature of death and

the nature of children.
All of your anguish in life
was wasted on you

because you never
learned to be wretched and
your sermons possessed you.

There was
no saving you.
No exorcism of you.
​
You just let strange and inappropriate
expectations masquerade as love
and you made me into what you

expected and needed
at the time. You contained multitudes
from your life of you

and no one knew if they were
witnessing a ruination
or a rumination

when you grabbed me
by the hand to kneel
by the dead purple lady

in the crate with the sincerely
finished hands
and then demanded

I repent.
And people
just let you.
​
There were
unnamed demons
flying everywhere.