Chelsea

There are too many mistakes here for words.  I'll get around to spell-checking them soon but tonight Je Suis Fatigue(e?)

Chelsea’s dreams are filled with butterflies, swallows, icebergs and Cartesian maps.  The fill the skies with their cries and swells, until the clouds turn pink and the rains fall like liquid gold.  It licks her skin as she dances naked through the backyards of her mind.  Her toes trace the mud that swims up her calves but she continues to spin, eyes towards the sky.

                  It’s no mistake that her gaze floats up, her skies are filled with light and melted gems to keep a smile coaxed upon her infantile face.  If her eyes should drop, the see the ground where dreams become her nightmares and her fears become the clay through which her mind moulds the figures in the gross.  Soldiers lie, their dead eyes staring back from behind a film that mists their view.  The blood soaks through cardboard cloth and tin-hard hats off-angle slip from paled foreheads. 

Once, long ago, Chelsea tried to close the eyes but in minutes they would snap to life and watch her as though behind a milky veil.  For every man she laid to rest, two more appeared in ghostly solid form upon her feet.  They are men, she says, without a soul.  They die for nations, prophets, who claim that after sacrifice comes glory, heaven, everything as some reward.  But it never comes.  Instead they wind up here, in the battlefields that plague the mind of pre-pubescent girls who can’t escape.

So she looks up, pretends she cannot feel their sobs, pretends she doesn’t know that in her Eden lie the broken promises of stories.  The lie as tales, of make believe and unknown claims.  They’re spun from liquid gold that falls from sky and sinks to earth as magic mysteries of life beyond the grave.  With every drop that races down young Chelsea’s cheek she spreads the word that everything is fine.  The gold drops listen, think she’s true, through lies she tells herself just to pretend that this is fake, she’ll be ok.  And every lie to save her mind becomes another lie to kill a man, a boy, prepared to save his soul.

Chelsea’s dreams are filled with butterflies, swallows, icebergs and Cartesian maps.  They rise above her, castle walls to shelter her from bodies.  But they watch her, judge her, even after eyes are closed and lies are said.  The skies are filled with light and so her shadows live upon the ground.  Alone in Dreamworld screams won’t work, her calls go empty, useless, echoes on the ice that utter back.  The butterflies all scatter with her shakes and shrieks, and the swallows take to wing like tiny airplanes course through the heavens no one’s ever found.  The maps are there, a drawn out picture, telling her that here is here.  Though she runs, she dances through her skies of pink, her rains of gold, she can’t wake up and she the world stays still.