my bitter tongue halts my growth but also heals it.
you, advocating yourself, are glitter, artificial to the sun’s warm glow.
at seven, with the coolness of her feeling
the moon upholds truth in her palms outreached to the earth
revealing a fraud, picking portraits for herself.
others blink, fall and are hidden. they do not count to you,
a thief who spits behind the flowers it has laced their arms with.
arrows shoot then, poison-laced,
so quickly i do not even feel them. unless i look behind me
i do not see the shears protruding from my back.
a spine, i have one, does the murmuring creature too?
in the sun’s loving acceptance of all, you have commodified me.
you tend to your own complexion, a painted mimicry of the sun
whose silken textures run over every forest.
yet the moon’s gentle beams reveal if we look.
through the lace gown is a vile appetite:
a flower grew into the soil.
consuming others has under grown you,
though others thought they understood you;
allowed the wordless breaking of flowers by a painted tyrant.
of you, the sun may believe a flower but the moon confirms a weed.
dawn breaks the silence,
i sought only a hand to hold.
the moon rises from her hammock,
her silver jury crowns my eyes.
knowingly, in the end, under sun or moon:
flowers still rise.