A sweet little something, to ring in the new year

I want to be the gilded bird inside your cage. The sweet, little golden bird that sings on command and whispers secrets in your ear when you pull down the sheets and put me on my back. I want you to ruffle my respectable, middle-class feathers that think they're made of something special and put your dirt all over me. And then when you're finished playing with me, I want you to put me away again so I can sleep until you're ready for the next song to start.

Or if not the song bird, then the spaniel. the adoring little cocker spaniel who gets tangled in your feet as you walk me about on a leash here and there. The one you sometimes feel a pressing urge to kick out of the way because it's so needy. The little spaniel dog who only wants your love, whose singular life goal is to attract and hold your attention so that I can feel some of the love you seem to lavish so freely over every other aspect of your life. Little spaniel running around mindlessly for her master.

If you don't want a lapdog then I could be your silk. The silk that you don't want to dirty with your callous hands, the ones you describe as filthy, bad and wrong. The bad old man with the filthy hands and the silk coat. The silk coat you'd never wear out in public for fear of public mockery, but that you stroke your hands over when you lock yourself in your home, burying your face in the folds of me. A cherry red silk coat that is the one bright spot in this dark and dirty existence you've carved for yourself.

Most of all though, I want to be your flower. You could put me in a little glass dome to protect me from the hard and scary creatures of our tiny world and then admire me from without. One should never listen to the flowers. One should simply look at them and breathe their fragrance. You could admire me and breath me in for fourty-four sunseats, until one of the fragile volcanos tore our tiny world apart. Or I could be your star that you lived on, and in all the world there would be only one of me.

Or like we said, I could play the red riding hood to your wolf. And when I strayed off of the path of needles and pins, like you knew that I would - you would be there to watch me from the bushes. The comparitively innocent flower that had miles to go before she slept and many more tricks to learn from her wolf. And when I finally found my way again you would seduce me off of my path again, and eat me. Out.

And then I would draw you a snake that had eaten an elephant, and you might tell me that you wanted a picture of a small sheep instead. And we could smile at the impossibility of it all - knowing no one else was privy to our world, that no one else understood that we were doing things of consequence.