Wrapping her pale skin invisibly, it carries with it the scent of dead romance. Shifting from one state to the next. Rock and sand, hidden wells and bones. Speeding past with no history to speak of, a landscape reeking of death and carrion. Spirits hiding in the shadows of heat and nudity. Killers picking off the weak, lost souls destined never to make it back home. The highways of nowhere, the ghost towns long forgotten. Somewhere in those crumbling ruins, she gazes at her reflection wondering how her beauty slipped away. The colour of her hair and the texture of flesh shining dimly, she remembers a time when she exuded it effortlessly. Radiant and young, a victim of lust and natural instinct. Eyes that covet, minds that destroy. That drill away, year after year until all that’s left is hollow and broken. Like cracked porcelain dolls, suffocating in a windowless attic. The way paint peels off those boards of wood, the way it flakes and drifts away with the breeze. Bottled beer and pick-up trucks. Aimlessly driving until something comes into view, something cheap and easy. Sleazy, like puckered lips waiting to kiss the asphalt. Limbs and rings of limbo, spreading beneath the sun. Dripping with honey, singing to all the insects, calling them back home. Skin infections and empty tins of paint, so bland and stale, like modern life. The future, buried with daughters and false education. Ten tons of rubble and alcohol, falling on top of glass coffins. Sinking into breathless nights, the headlights glare as she drinks in some bar where the regulars are wooden and mute. Music plays with no tune and the barman smiles with no teeth. He’d just as easy cut her throat than fuck her, but his dick is limp and his fingers riddled with arthritis, so no can do. Losing herself, she disappears into the bottom of the glass then into the bottom of a well. Some passageway into her childhood, a day when her father broke down the walls of her mind. Trust and faith, left trampled under foot. Tears, like pious mouthed nothings. The maze of her despair, the spiral staircase. Never ending and circular. The shapes that lurk upon her spine, that grip her wrists when the sandman comes out to play. The moon no witness, he stalks her at the foot of the bed, always watching and inching closer as the night goes on. Closer and closer with each passing hour until he takes all that he wants. The great consumer, the terrible reducer. Haunting her ever since. She tries to run, but instead she should swim. In a sea of dreams, beneath the surface and out of reach. Swimming until the world goes away, a day when the oceans of time cease and all that remains is the lightness of being. The dizziness of freedom. The way the wind blows through those fields of corn. The way she smiles as you appear before her, honest and true. Having waited so patiently for you to have followed her, the nature of her self is beyond the realms of understanding. The rose that she left behind at the end of the pier, she sees it held aloft and smiles. For finally the moment has come, when the new horizon is ready to be faced.