untitled ,

You did not read what I wrote because you were too young, too fragile. You did not read what I wrote because you were too old, too stale. You did not read what I wrote because you were too afraid. And were you too scared to let Jacquelyn read it, thinking that just because she is yet to reach her eleventh birthday, she would be afraid of that part in the second stanza where he extracts a knife from his coat pocket? Children fear
n o t h i n g

Would you not let Michael read it, thinking he would avert his eyes from the naked girl with the black pony?

And Lucy, would she bend her eyes away from the page when she
read the words; he hung with
blood dripping, the
silence swallowing the
night, the night swallowing the moans, and
be so in terror, that she ran home to mother and was so scared on seeing the midnight rider that she fell and broke her body;
who will find her in the morning ?

You did not show what I wrote to the guests at dinner because of that line in the third stanza where the young girl is crouching in the darkness, - her heart removing itself from her chest with fear - and he approaches from behind and begins to peel skin off her back like a new potato; she screams like a strangled baby. You did not show what I wrote when your parents came down from the North last Christmas because you did not want them to see what I had become in their absence

because I had become something new, something more