long acorn
I.
It is a weathered cylinder of captured shadows,
oxidized tin dulled to the color of old apologies,
its skeletal cardboard ribs soft with age,
collapsed inward like a chest that forgot how to breathe.
The outer skin peels in thin continental plates—
a flaking topography of forgotten hands,
fingerprints pressed and abandoned,
anchored in dust for decades
until even the dust grew tired of remembering it.
When I lift it,
the weight is deliberate.
Not heavy in pounds,
but dense with years—
a burdened geometry resting squarely in the palm,
as if the object itself is asking
to be held carefully,
to be forgiven for surviving this long.
II.
Inside, the archive refuses order.
Loose shards—plastic pretending to be glass,
glass pretending to be precious—
begin their dry, rhythmic clatter,
a nervous ballet of sapphire debris,
ruby-red splinters scraping against one another
with the sound of restrained impatience.
Nothing is simply blue.
There is bruised, electric violet—
the color of a thought struck too hard.
There is stagnant emerald, pale-veined and sour,
as if green had learned the language of illness.
There is a sulfurous amber glow,
thick as a warning light behind fogged lenses.
They tumble through anaerobic silence,
each collision leaving no echo,
only the sensation that something should have sounded louder
if the space were not so sealed,
so starved of air,
so committed to containing itself.
verbal thorn