Crush

Give me back my ornament, she says.
He picks at her like straw hearts and black stones
And she eyes him like he’s a studio shoot for Valentine’s Day.
He doesn’t know she wrote the script.
He scribbles out the word love,
The word that is the loudest,
And hands it to her and tells her to read:
Red wheels, cock bone.
Her eye skirts around the blacked out word.
She trades him wallets for tickets to her sold out show.
He tells her she looks like an arrow that’s been shot
Down a cement highway and has skidded into the ground.
He tells her she’ll have less luck learning to sing,
Than finding any pink in the corn field.
She watches as her heart turns into a beetle,
First he picks the black stones and rearranges them to be the beetle’s eyes
And all of its arms,
And then he takes the straw and rolls it into a circle
To be the beetle’s body. She says,
How dare you take my parts off here?
He blushes slightly, his knees quiver, he waivers as though there is a strong wind,
And then he sings a song:
Red wheels, cock bone.
She feels the bricks underneath her collide as she stumbles home,
Whispering good night to the orange moon and purple sky,
Listening to the crushed as it whispers, goodbye.