Close your eyes, little one

You just might see

You might see the truth, and you wouldn’t love the world as you do

Don’t take a breath because you might just feel the sky inside your lungs, and you

Might just feel the acrid tang the air carries with it always now

You might just feel the crumbles of sand from a great Sphinx scratch against your throat as you exhale

Put your fingers to your ears, because you might just hear the windchimes from your childhood garden

Shiver through your head like a memory always does

Sometimes the world is better when you can’t see all of it, little one, so squint until the horizon

So thin and sharp and real

Becomes a pair of lips instead of the end of the world, instead of a knife blade, instead of the limit

Only think of the moon, little one, as a bullet hole, and

Forget the ones that have killed so many in the night

Every death, nothing more than a twinkling star

The blood only so vivid red against the white of a nurse's gown, but you don’t see, little one,

So how can it matter when everything turns black in the darkness

And don’t believe that you can still taste the iron, because then you might just taste

An atom bomb, and you wouldn’t be able to handle that, little one

Open your mouth and you might just taste the hot pine of a forest, slowly overtaken by the

Late June heat

Little one

Don’t think, little one

You will only create your own tragedy, but I have told you

Little one

There is too much already