tired future
crystal ball, shining in your golden hands. take a look and tell me i'll become something worth your time. the sun refracts off your glass face and shatters on the walls: your presence, filling the room with gold.
you do not tell me what future of mine you hold in those hands. you leave me to put the pieces together myself and guess. you do not reach out with your gilded fingers and smooth my worry lines. you do not look at me at all.
i want to slice you open like a sacred deer, spread your innards out and augur what you will not tell me. i dream of the way your ribs would part and all would become clear - the heat rising from your body would cleanse me, and as your blood spills out, scarlet and boiling, you would look at me finally, you would see me. your shine would dull, and i would glow. i would become something worth anything.
even wading through this red tinged fantasy, i know it will not work. the gold would peel from me like cheap acrylic paint, and my disarray would only serve to make you a martyr. your intestines would not provide me the future, they would only be meat, pink and writhing. and through it all, the crystal sphere you clutch would roll out of your fingers and meet the floor - solid turned to dust, the meaning gone with it. you would simply be a body, and i a murderer.