If we are marked to die, we are enough to do our country loss; and if to live, the fewer men, the greater share of honor.

No way in hell I'm going to sleep tonight,
I think I'll probably end up watching
infomercials and flicking through channels.

Maybe it's my fault, I don't know,
I'm currently making tea because,
the answer lies in the tea leaves.

At least, that's what my grandma told me,
when I was a little girl, roughly four or five.
In my blue sunday dress, my favorite dress.

I have a photo of me, sitting on the steps of the church,
A baptist church, a place of heell, fir, and brim'stn.
to put it in a rough phonetic sort of way.

I have these awful sort of bangs,
they're cut evenly across my little forehead,
making me look so small and frail.

They didn't let me run around very often
since being prone to bouts of prolonged coughing
isn't exactly healthy for a small child.

I grew out of that croup of sorts,
and sat down ever so daintily for that photo
of me smiling, honestly wanting my sucker back.

I recall it being a mango flavoured dum-dum,
and I still love them, they're my favorite flavour,
they now remind me of things that have come to pass.

Clayton, and Tyler, and Jonas.
Three boys I lost to that man in the sky.
They had no right to be leaving just yet either.

Of course, none of that occured until about five years
after this photo was taken, me, sitting there,
looking lifelessly pale and frail.

I had been a sickly child, having no other options
but to sit through sermons of what would happen to me
if I wasn't a good little girl.

I most certainly did not want to go to hell,
nor had I ever intended to grow up and become this;
This being an awfully stubborn teenager with a knack for explosives.

Somehow this leads me to the only photo I have of my parents,
together that is. It was taken the year before I was born,
my mother was twenty-two. She never had a chance to live.

She's told me this once or twice, that she didn't get the chance
that she was just a scared young woman who had
what she thought to be no chance at ever having children.

She was raised a Lutheran, don't have the slightest clue
what they do, but I do suspect it is far better
than all that heell, fir, and brim'stn.

This photo is the constant reminder of what not to be.
Though my parents look so....in love...
It wasn't meant to be.

I was three and a half,
asking where my mother,
not mommy, was.

So, Baptist preachers, tea leaves,
and a childhood of lies put me here,
counting in sets of four, and smiling at strangers.

This photo of my parents?
Not to remind me of what could've been.
But to remind me of what I shouldn't be.