I bleed and bleed and bleed, until my strawberry skin becomes a shriveled shell of a fruit, dried and crinkled into dead sweetness, dusky tang darkened to a bitterness.

The Queen Of Cats blinked at me, lapping up the spilling guts of my fruitless soul. Her eyes searched mine, perfect, porcelain blue on emphatic, endless brown. I see shipwrecks, I hear screaming sailors in her eyes. I see birds falling from the deep sapphire sky, I see plagues emerging from blue corn. I see the villagers retching, throwing their dead into the streets. I see the faces going red, then purple, then blue, see them going slack.

What does she see in mine, I wonder? What is to be seen in brown?

We stared like long lost lovers, shocked by the toll the years have taken on us both. Oh, my love, you are so beautiful, but you look so sad.

The blood trickled down my dress, my strawberry skin oozing into the ground. I knew, suddenly, why. I fed the dirt, I gave life to the soil. Out of the gravelly ground, green shot. My blood sizzled, boiled, grew.

Surrounded now, I closed my eyes. I heard the green drown out my beautiful blue, heard it tangle around The Queen Of Cats like the nooses of the gallows sliding down around the necks of criminals. My baby birds, my poems, I have found you, my ungrateful children.

But they came for me next.

My poor, lovely Lioness is gone -- she feeds the ground now. My poems grow from bits of her, tendrils of leafy green emerging from her dust. Remaining is one sterling blue eye, watching itself be overtaken.

Nature, now, is words, and words, nature.

My poems wrapped around me, hostility healing my wounds. They plugged the holes like odd-shaped corks forced into the necks of the wrong wine bottles. They bandaged the slashes, squeezing my body like dozens of separate green snakes. Perhaps my children hurt me, but who could hurt them back? Perhaps they choke me and break me and tear my insides, but I can only thank them for it.

The natives, I heard their footsteps crunching over the grass. I knew I should warn them of my violent children, the sharp blades of their tongues and the cold steel of their skin, but they wrapped around my mouth. They bound my lips, forcing their way over my tongue with a slimy, metallic taste.

Inside of me, they forced my throat apart. They snaked through my broken parts, stepping over the wreckage like satisfied tyrants, here to reclaim their once wonderful land. I am only pieces, now, my loves. You may have me if you want me.