Little Red Flags

Four A.M

Her skin is that sickening black and blue again,

Yet she sits on that rickety swing and puffs her cigarette.

Looking at the sky, she smiles, as if in another realm,

It’s four A.M and she stares at the stars, when she could’ve slept.

“Why four A.M? Why not one, two or three?”

The world is a sleep and the evil is at bay,

All the sinners are asleep and the tortured have escaped.

The stars can finally sigh and say,

We are free, when at one, two and three we were caged.

She wraps the blanket around her shoulders

And snuggles deeper into its warmth.

With constellations, she draws fallen soldiers

Their chests pierced with thorns.

“Do you escape from him at four A.M, just like these stars do at night?”

I do not escape, I cannot escape,

I merely regenerate like these stars.

I can hide in the shadows and the shape,

And when the sun rises, it will illuminate again these black and blue scars.

She runs a thumb over her ripped lips

And then traces the cuts on her cheek.

Her eyes twinkle with the glow of the stars and a smile forms on the tips.

In the four A.M twinkle, she’s a surviving hero when in the morning she’s an angel too weak.

“What do the four A.M stars say to you, dear?”

They sparkle their brightest, telling me to hold on.

They make a thread with their blurry bright dots.

Telling me if I hold tight, I’ll make it through this invisible storm.

They don’t say as much, they just do. They fix me a little, tying the loose threads into loose knots.

The smile starts to fade as four A.M slips

And the sky starts to tinge with a dark, daunting blue.

Her mouth a straight line of broken, bruised lips,

As the four A.M stars orderly vanish from view.