Natasha

Been lonesome two years since she disappeared
I'm at the park where she was last seen
A vast green clearing wrapped up in maple trees spilling the morning rain from their leaves
I used to walk here with a girl seventeen at the time
Mistress of seventeen smiles sublime with flaming locks of red in
autumn and burning locks of orange In the summertime we were solemn and awkward that last night together
She laid by my side staring into starless skies black as fallen angel feathers
I stared into the forest pretending not to see the hangman she was hiding in her eyes of serpent green
She said there was another
I refused to believe her
I'd thought we'd kiss till our tongues tied together all my loving memories became scenes of frenzied slaughter
My hands became cruel talons as they moved to destroy her
Neck broke like a toy in a careless child's grip
My tears rained down into dead eyes and splashed upon her lifeless lips
I put her in the ground like a flower here
I am standing in that same spot today where my angel's empty shell last laid and as my tears began to well up once more I see a path into
the treeline that I'd never seen before
I follow it down into a ravine find
a hole in the earth framed in the roots of a birch
tree subtle echoes of her voice speaking words I've never heard but the way she hissed her "s"'s it just had to be her
I smell honeysuckle then opium two of her signature scents I pull aside all the thistles and vines and mesmerized I make my
descent as I crawl further inside the light slowly dies and the dirt begins
to feel like her skin I tremble as
I drag my fingers down the walls
caressing her sweet flesh again
I'm sliding down trying so hard not to fall
slipping on the blood that's seeping from the walls then suddenly
I'm surrounded by a thousand of her eyes
bathing the tunnel in a strange green
light the eyes show me pictures like ghostly television
screens all her thrashing final struggles and her ravaged
corpse serene the tunnel is
closing behind me pressing me further and further down
I'm being swallowed by her earth and consumed by her ground the end is moving into sight I gasp
and I scream as I see her lovely mouth five times the size of me her lips
curl into a grin around her crooked gnashing teeth I'm pulverized and
devoured in the jaws of a girl seventeen