these fading things

they sewed a lion's heart in you, Ann, from the get go, they sewed it in tight and tried to keep you in a plastic cage for years. they gave you a label, Ann, and tried to keep you from knowing what there was to know. but I saw it coming, I knew you'd bust out. I saw you rampage out into the city streets and lay low the skyscrapers, cut them down out of your horizon just cos you wanted to see everything how it's supposed to be. Ann, I saw when you were leaving town on the only bridge out. You stopped there at the apex and listened to a distant train howling in the dark, I smelled it too Ann, the lingering reek of carbon fumes, vaporized poison, something so familiar, the residual exhaust of so many before you that have given up, accepted that, yes, maybe, they weren't supposed to know where they were really going. But you're not just passing through Ann, they're keeping something from you, so I followed you out of town and into the wild desert plains, I raced after you until thick clouding black covered the sky. I came upon you laid down, the rain catching in your eyelashes, pooling silver about you. I'd hope you wouldn't fall in love then and there but when those clouds cleared out, when those ringing sunshine bells tinctured the sound of morning come anew with gold, I heard those lion heart sutures strain and rust. I saw you go wild, as if in these shadows we cast you can see our infinite genealogy until another night disappears us, as if all that is hidden away from us can be harvested out of the winds and spun into the hangman's rope ever gently torqued about our throats as time passes as we keep falling from the heavens until the snap of our necks just before we land. I saw you unbound and fierce, rising back up the rope, a roman candle flaring untamed and charging into the night sprawl above you. Ann, I saw it all, the molten lead stars, the poacher's bullets shoot you down just before you kissed the cheek of your destroyer. I followed the arc of your meteor descent. I found you laid low empty handed and forlorn in a wilderness, the scavengers hungry and on the run. Ann, I excised your beast heart and threw your body into a nearby stream. I walk back into the city, heart in hand, listening for the sound of some broken thing on the verge of being born