changeling nobody tells you that you'll have to turn your heart into old shoe leather one day, shred pictures, sleep with the dog. he must've been inside me a thousand times, but who counts these things? who thinks the time will come when it's the last mouth against mouth, the final creak of the bed, come midnight? his footprints haunt my house; they lead everywhere, yet nowhere. he left before the plot had ended. no silver dropped from a Roman palm. no poison or beheadings or, god forbid, a drowning, but like a vampire, he has taken my blood. my veins shred open like rice paper, spilling bad love poems into the night. i have no pulse. no tears. i am as white as the winter's rain. Pris Campbell ©2006 Published iin MEAT, S.A. Griffin, editor. S.A. Griffin is co-editor of The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry,as well as an excellent poet. Art: Pris Campbell Return to Poetry Index II Return to Homepage