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Whittling
Wisps of dust
Curl and unfurl in musky air.
They arrived on scene,
And the dust coated everything.
They arrived too late on scene,
A figure of too-smooth wood,
Sandpaper in her needle-thin fingers,
For the dust had always had always covered everything.
5 years ago
She,was
lost on a whim
And wandering through a twisted reality-
Had taken the sandpaper in her imperfect hands.
She had seen the
Perfect, porcelain people
With their delicate,
Smooth china.
Perfect, but porcelain.
And she?
She was crafted of wood.
Rotten, horrible wood.
She’d often ask herself,
Why wood?
Why would anyone
Craft her of hideous, knotty
Rotty,
Bulky,
Splintery wood?
She didn’t know.
Yet she had taken,
The sandpaper in her imperfect hands
Knowing, feeling that if she could peel away
Fractions of herself
She could feel whole again.
She tried to rub away the knots,
The splinters
And the rot.
And she began to whittle herself away.
Nobody noticed the ever slight-slim
And the fractions that were just
Ever so different-
But still, even as nights
Faded on
The wood grain
Like her growing pain
Would never fade away.
So she whittled
Acquiring new knife
She whittled
And whittled
Sandpaper and knife
She whittled
Further away
Hoping just maybe
One spectacular day
She could see that perfect
Someone she was going to be.
Soon her dust coated
Everything in plain sight
And in sprinkles of daily life
She began to complain about her growing plight
Slivers of jokes
Whispers of help
Her voice was too quiet
To reach out-
Her dust coated
Thinning limbs
Wet lashes
And everything she did.
Her once oak-ish colors
Began to fade away
And become mute
And her dust coated everything
She thought she once loved.
As the problem grew
Her fear grew too
And she knew
This was not a not a normal thing
To do.
But still she shrank
As she desperately
Whittled herself away.
Like fragile porcelain
She began to break
Her parts began to fail
And she quivered into her fall.
Soon
Friends and family
Had to carry
The one who could no longer
Carry her own aching self.
Still,
She whittled away.
Her legs, and arms
Were thin like sticks
No longer a strong structure
Like bone
But rather thin
Unreliable
Like a crippling disease.
One day her arm snapped
As she whittled it away
Hope suddenly fluttered from reach
As she creaked
And groaned,
Fitful
With her burden.
She was so fragile
And so weak
She found she had no strength
To ever again speak.
She was so fragile
And so weak…
She was so needy
And clingy
Perhaps her friends grew tired of her leaning.
Oh,
What great burden was she.
She took knife and paper,
In smooth, broken hands
And more determined
Than ever before,
Whittled herself away.
They arrived on scene;
The dust coated everything.
They arrived far too late,
On scene,
For she had, begun,
Oh, so long, ago
To whittle herself away.
They found her, a figure of too-smooth wood
Sandpaper in her needle-thin fingers
To find dust covering everything.
They found her in dust,
A knife
Jammed deep in her chest
And jerked upwards
Crudely so
Was a little wooden heart
Which she had tried to whittle away.

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