Monday, April 16, 2007

Fatherless Sons

This is an ancient pain. Ancient and frothed into the insides of our stomachs,
awake, carved into where there are no scars that tell a story.
You hold me like I’m a kid
But your hands are stroking up and down my legs,
and I can feel your heartbeat aching
to deny what you say,
to overtake me, warlike and whole;
fling into an existence that might season
slowly, like tendered flower gardens and winters
that expand as though there
is no expansion to return from
or run.
On to find out what is this pain you give away
to me you think of leaving. When at the time it seems so easy to return,
Reign, like a paradise falling on,
the ages you’d been drying out.
This is the pain that crusts people
into wooden statues of what once was their charisma.
Go on, turn your eyes away,
A boy that wants to
not be angry
anymore.
You hold me like you never let your mother.
You hold me like you squeeze a pillow when you nap aimlessly.
Like you hold a rock you want to throw at every window, but don’t.
You keep it, always.
There are bags of them inside your muscles.
Your back remembers how you sit when you don’t want to cry.
And mine does too.

February, 2007