Little Streams

Looking back into long forgotten streams
I’d passed on my way out of childhood,
I recalled a reflection of
a little princess without a face,
without a form.

She beamed a bright yellow
all across her surface,
and laughed in tiny ripples
at jokes she told herself.

Beside her,
her knight,
a placeholder for imagination.

To herself, quietly, she spoke the words:
“I’ll always remember this moment.”
It was not a request,
not a prayer,
but a fact.

She knew this little stream would continue on
and she knew this still little quaint peace of mind was hers forever.

I glance away.

Little fool.

Why must you remember?
If you had never to remember,
you would have never left.

The stream carried on to much deeper waters,
full of things far greater than knights.
Mud turned bright yellow into shit brown,
and a face took form, gnarled, twisted in rage.

I look back into streams I’d hoped would dry up.
So she might not gaze
back onto the reflection
beyond the waters surface,
where air suffocates,
and lies tighten lines into forms.
Where forms are slashed with big black lines,
with red oozing blotches of disgust.

That little yellow girl,
princess of imagination,
looks back at me in absolute horror.

She cannot understand the lines, the forms, the sickness.
She cannot hold together the sickening blob of terror.

She hides, deep in her shallow pool,
burrowing farther and farther,
releasing mud and sticks and rocks that break her fragile bones.

She decays
into ruined yellow visage,
with overfed cheeks and beady dull eyes.

I blink and the reflection is perfectly still. I look and there I am
brown, bloody, broken.

(A very dark little ditty I wrote up when I was feeling sorry for myself. Just needed it get it out there. Thank you for reading.)