Castle Kirsten

Reverse the car and start again.
Run me over and start

again.

You and I, we're always going through the motions

of this doll parade.

Synthetic hair entangling neon lace.

These figures sprawl out on the floor

In their motionless attempts to fill us up.

To act out scenes.

I find myself positioning plastic limbs in ways

we may never move ours.

It's weird, isn't it?

The way I thought up a house and named it my own.

I thought up a family and named it not yours.

You can hardly annoy me if you don't even know me. 

Sloppily sewn flags atop a painted castle.

And gilded picture frames with Barbie portraits.

Your shoulders curl away from me and

the red car traces beneath your hand.

The zig zagging tracks on the tattered carpet look so much to me like passports 

and diaries and college degrees.

Sometimes I have this image of you, torn and ground into clumps of pixels on my screen,

trying to talk to me over miles and miles of white noise,

but the sound goes mute on my computer.

and all I want is to click you back into place.

You're married now.

How the hell are you married now.

Your limbs aren't plastic any longer.

And I'm happy but I can't shake the feeling that we did this all wrong.

Maybe we did this all wrong.

Maybe corvettes and castles are the same fucking thing when you break them into these pixels

and rearrange the colors.

Red over gold. Gold over red. A fusion of the two.

And maybe the elemental squares sprinkled across screens were always the only thing we really needed to fill us up.

Reverse the car and start again.

Pick me up and start 

again.