The Layer Cake

The Layer Cake We are a skewed birthday cake, generations of lopsided layers baked badly by ancestors of fervent but defective intent, teetering atop the stale and dried out. The layers descend into the past, inedible and mostly forgotten while we the temporary top deny bad ingredients and tiltings and frosting with crème cruel. We concoct the next tier with hope and even love but use a cookbook specifying flour of custom and bias and spices of mistakes. It is a mighty wonder that the cake still stacks and those just set in place don’t slide off to extinction on the icing of our failings.