Lines

Lines

I used the lines on my face as a loom—fabricating long strings to tie me to the tragic minutiae of our everyday life in this forever house

(Please don't call them wrinkles; call them life lines)
I can let you read me—line by line
And still I won't make sense

I used to hang our washing on a clothesline
The sun would bleach away the dirt of us
Now we have a dryer so our sheets look the same
But they have the tang of something unpleasant

I would gnaw at the oblong box—scared to get out—terrified to stay

So each time I moved my red lines
Until the only place I could find them was on my "going out" lips
A scarlet gloss—your pseudo-wife—fault lines covered by powder

It turns out I could only ever be seen by the deities roaming the skies—and you with your basic geometry only saw me from the foothills

So you never realized you had come to the end of the line