You Did a Bad Thing

You weren’t there for tail-between-legs, the conduit-child. Did you want a piece of meat? Could we settle for just the disease? I don’t want to show up for you, weave you into art, cradle the horror that is my body and know I share your hips. The day I told you I hated you, were you even there? So I will not write to you. I will scrape the arthropodic corpse off a shoe-shaped grave, and write to what I killed. A monarch, wings folded over grass trampled flat. You deserved to live. You deserved more than to die from a̶ ̶b̶a̶d̶ ̶k̶i̶d̶ the tail-between-legs, conduit-child. I took you home, wrapped you in divine tissue, watched you flitter down into the window well. There was no meaning to any of it. It meant nothing. You meant nothing. But I remember it, little body still bent; your voice. I could feel it in my stomach. ‘You did a bad thing’.