The Lively Defeated

When we crumble, we become new.

Our alter egos

are being destroyed.

We throw them into a bucket of water

and watch it catch fire,

the oil of their veins on the surface,

like pollutants running through a coal-fired bog.

The circulation of this news is not only

for people who pay fifteen dollars a month;

everyone feels the plague of the tear-away heart,

the face like a costume vase,

smashed and easily replaceable, just to run the same scene over again

in different lighting.

We can walk in heels and sign cards

with a curl of our fingertips dipped in fluorescent ink,

but we always think:

how much faster could I run in flats?

How different is my writing when signed “Dear diary?”

Still we tower above the competition,

the dragged-out pace of a ninety-nine mph fastball,

waiting for one hundred,

the song of our hearts so rhythmic and broken.

When the mask cracks and we watch it fall into the valley below,

all to take a bite of the peach hanging in its tendered leaves,

fuzzy and golden in the paling light,

who will be there to see us?