Overhead Maze, Come Night

by D.S. West

Bethany tugs at the vines overhanging the wall, brick,
that they can't get over. She's the one with pink on.
 
Heather, blue shirt and skirt, accuses the moon of abandonment.
"We do everything you say, and still you act like a stupid dohk."
 
'Dohk' is supposed to be 'dork,' but through two new gaps
where baby teeth were, she hasn't mastered the new acoustics yet--
 
and blue starts stomping, while pink, Bethany consoles a leaf
with no name, on the wall, the middle of nowhere and growing.
 
"But you promised!" Heather howls, fists curled
 
until Bethany, at last, has had enough. Bidding adieu
her new friend and fellow climber, scaling the grid,
 
she addresses not just Heather but the brick and mortar
eighty-year maze, the vines and captive leafs, whose echoes
 
come to her manipulated, distorted untrustworthy echoes,
but, echoes from the aquatic; subdermal of alleged meaning,
 
junk succulent flesh which, stripped, gives visions of true pith;
so, chew: the prize isn't savory-sweet taste, but promise of life.  
 
"The moon makes nor breaks promises," says pink, to blue;
"she only encourages you to. So you're the dork, dork."

​
Charlotte Brontë Sets Fire to Inner-City Brothel
 
Don't break the bank, sleepyhead…
manuscript arrives via airborne bubbles,
commercial pink supersensory backdrop…
 
identities, interpretations, soft-serve oozing
out the mouths of sousing machines
running on egg-timers
 
establishes sweetness;
cane sugar, then the cane:
ten-thousand cups, and then the brown,

burial-ground brown, wherein Mr. Rochester
descends the stair, upholding a prosthetic replica,
his earthly mother, original killer, to accuse her
 
of damning him to cruelty, love and blindness,
yet then, a shamed animal shunned from its bowl,
he pleads her forgiveness for what he's wrought,
 
skinning his knees needlessly
for ossified quills, immortal author
presently decomposing.