Dora blasts downstairs
To entertain the little girl
Who waits for my return
Alone on the couch
The screen is a dizzy cocktail of vibrant colors
Painstaking, wide-eyed blinks;
A ringing falsetto screech
As if every syllable deserved to be thundered
From Mt. Everest’s peak
But up here there is no hurricane
Wailing through every agitated skin cell, bone cell;
There’s only a honeyed whisper,
Discerned but not registered
Silence drips through the cracks
Runs up the rocking chair
Stifles the beam’s croaks
Comes to blanket us in sweet nothingness
A pillow for the darkness
It is the epitome of everything
That is worth living for, dying for,
When her head lolls back casually,
Beating with my heart,
Beads of perspiration gathering momentum
For the slide over her soft, red skin
Her fingers, minuscule, each a pencil stub
Smeared with orange carrot glaze,
Grasp her bottle beside my own,
The tug of her mouth rewards her
With a gush of warm vanilla
There are no angry lines
Spider webbed across her forehead
No more pink-ringed sapphire eyes
Her heart does not scream
From anxious exertion
The moonlight seeps
Through the blowing curtains
Dances across the shadowy closet
Her bright irises perk up to watch
The white stripes step in time
To the drowsy cacophony of the night
Life is nothing but now;
There will be nothing more to come,
Nothing to remember from before
This is all
This is everything