Wounded Souls

Across years

Through endless miles

We imagined ourselves alone

Fighting through hateful guile

Building walls of strongest stone

Against which the horrors pile

Hiding from all our fears.

-0-

Frozen Smile

The same face.

Always the same.

Never a crack to be seen.

Yet she sees through his lies.

Sees the lines left behind

Sees the result of theft

Sees the smile slip

But only when he thinks he’s not being watched.

Alone in the corner,

At the table,

Standing in the cold, waiting,

She sees behind the smile,

Eternally frozen in place.

One day,

She asks him,

Trying to peak beneath the frozen smile,

The mask of calm,

Of joy.

Behind him then,

Seen only in the eye of her imagination

She sees a door hanging in air.

He stands before her,

Before it,

With a fixed smile of grim determination

In place on his frozen face.

He answers her question,

And in so doing

The door cracks open.

Shadows crawl from behind that flimsy veil.

Bestial shapes and writhing hate,

Long,

Twisting,

Clawing,

Rending,

Tearing,

From behind the door they pour,

Long tendrils of inky dark,

Coiling around his shoulder,

Entwining his throat and pulling taut,

As the frozen smile dips a fraction

But only that.

Snapping back into place

The smile seals the door.

A frozen smile

In a frozen face.

Behind him, in her mind’s eye,

Beyond the border of the map she has of him

There be monsters there,

Just out of sight,

Lingering behind a frozen smile.

-0-

Porcelain Mask

Flawless features,

Perfect expression.

Never a crack to be seen.

He questions that serenity,

Wonders at the lingering legacy,

Of horrors unknown in her history.

Looking close,

But not too close,

He tries to find,

The secrets in her mind.

A question,

That’s what he asks,

The same kind as she asked him.

But the expression is unchanged.

Perhaps in her eyes?

A hint,

A whisper,

A ghost among the dead?

Her answer is steady,

Leaking through a million tiny cracks he cannot see.

Time is spent,

In earnest contemplation,

Time in learning her secret ways,

The million methods used to say,

All that cannot be uttered.

Time to strengthen their connection.

Beauty in that expression,

Carefully crafted ego,

Artful bravado.

Designed to conquer the world,

Damned to frozen perfection.

He sees the cracks then,

As their journey brings them closer,

Friendship blossoms as she speaks,

As they share,

Things he never had dared,

To dream before could belong to him.

But as they grow,

As he learns,

The cracks reveal themselves.

In their own time,

One

Then two

Three and more.

Tiny cracks

Old wounds.

Fissures and shatterings,

Evidence of her long, stony road.

Cracks carefully repaired,

Painstakingly filled and patched and smoothed,

Set back in place.

Kintsugi lines of gleaming gold,

In her porcelain mask

Behind which her eyes gleam with joyful mischief

Eyes in which he can see the cost of all that gold.

-0-

Across years

Through endless miles

We imagined ourselves alone

Fighting through hateful guile

Building walls of strongest stone

Against which the horrors pile

Wounded souls hiding from all our fears.