The Stars Glimmer Some Deceitful Secrets At Us
By Ashlee Elfman

The stars glimmer some deceitful secrets at us. These inanimate objects know nothing and everything. They absorb, but do not care about our humiliations and irrationalities, our pleasantries and our misgivings, they merely reflect them upon us. The stories are to us, in badly translated Latin (even though they are our own stories), and we ignore them rightly and move on.
A snub nosed preacher, a pickled handed housewife and five dirty children move down the same highway, and shuffle their feet along the flat and dusty. They ignore their fate and past as well, and see the nearest salvation as the nearest bed and hot cup. To them that is all in this world, to see outside of the basics would be frivolous.
(Even being aware of the realistic; the intense and narrow path that looms before us, when our stomachs ache and our lids grow heavy, some of us are not content when we find solutions to these problems. Some of us only feel borne when we are biting and scratching and gnawing away at life like savage dogs. We feel awake when we answer to no one, and we spit our own truths back at the stars.)

I wear my uncomfort like a cross around my neck, and smile awkwardly at all passers by. My lips move to one side of my face and splay open revealing crooked, un-doctored teeth. I play with my shirt, I squint, and curse and fidget like a madman. My bones restless within me. I am the madman around here, I am of the most unwanted matter. I am the junk on the seashore, washed up by a night of ferocity and passion.
I walk on the outskirts of everything. I walk crookedly with the most primal and fiercest animals. We bray together, and wallow together and scratch and lap up the blood of our enemies on all fours.
But even that universal language, between the animals and humans doesn't speak the truth to me. It is all just a foolish dead language. I find myself communicating with the dirt, with the mud and the long gone. I find myself communicating with nothing at all.

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