Keep your eyes down.

She picked up the apple from the dirt.

Putrid and mold ridden she bid of me to eat.

I stood there in the february wind like I had never seen these hills before.

I had seen these hills before--six hundred miles of these hills.

The air was the same as I'd left it and the apple just as rotten, and we stood there till I reached for the apple.

When the apple met my lips I was confused again,  crossed again, and lost again.

I cast that apple to the dirt a month ago, only to let it rot more before I would pick it up again.

I tried to leave the apple in the dirt.

.....

So I went back to where i'd grown up.

To taste the rotten fruit I'd left behind me.

To my lips it tasted like cider for a moment.

Cider that once greeted a finer vintage.

Cider that would strip me of my mind.

Cider that would keep me in this valley, underneath the dirt and worms and stone.

Cider that tasted like my putrid, mold ridden past.

Cider that tasted delicious to my dying lips.

Dying lips that once sang of a girl with hair as sweet as clemantine.

Dying lips that would never utter help again.

These dying lips.

These dying hands.

These dying eyes.

Better off dead than dying.