Crumbling-- this creeping hopelessness,
surely spawned from her own naive, impatient desire to no longer be a defective sculpture.
She needed the close warmth of a human
for days when icy despair gripped her whole being,
so she put her fractured life into his hands, allowing him to shape it to his desire.

He tried to repair her,
taking care to plaster over her many branching cracks,
picking up each shattered piece of debris with care but
he was no artist, and the fresh coat of paint he splattered onto her clay body
did little to hide the damage beneath.

She still wakes every morning with eyes clenched shut,
desperately trying to grasp onto disappearing strands of dreams
that regretfully float out and away from her waking consciousness.
Shuffling, her broken body moves out of bed and into the kitchen.

She looks over her husband’s shoulder,
eyes meeting a mountain of deathly white papers thrown onto the table.
She can’t hold the stare, seeing her own ghostly face among the milky pages,
childish mistakes laying among the multitude of scattered red pen marks
and threats of foreclosure.

Her gaze sinks further down as she trudges back to her dark room,
weighted by the looming cataclysm. She lets herself down
onto her bed again, filling the body-shaped trench
that she digs deeper every day.