Ghost Museum

I dream of wearing crowns, but I haven’t yet earned any. I only spot crowns in the wild, headless crowns in search of matching heads, but I collect people who once wore crowns for a while, like dethroned kings and queens and brides and grooms and beauty pageant winners and title holders, poets and bands in crowns of talent that outgrew them, or ghosts of royalty of any kind. Here’s my shelf of friends and ex-lovers, dust gathering on crowns of love they threw away, and this is a sample of those who looked cool and collected but acted like kids over time, masquerading in crowns of virtue they didn’t deserve.

I dream of wearing crowns, but I haven’t yet met anyone worth it. I only spot crowns discarded, and every time I try them on, they don’t fit, but I collect people who once wore them, because nobody’s grown enough to earn a crown forever and we’re all kids in kindergarten. We only play dress-up and pretend we move forward, but we’re only kids playing with crowns, and some of us are inventive and playful but most of us are only inventively immature, disguised clowns, collecting ghosts like we collect memories, nostalgic curators of what we almost were.