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I am not a little boy.
Blame
does not come from
nowhere, nothing, snatched
from empty space. Our
(re)actions are not
isolated, pristine or static
blank
as cold, white plates
hanging distantly
seamless
anonymous as
the moon.
Just as you there
(veiled woman, fragile heartless girl
monster, you intimate yet blunt
glass stranger)
are sometimes filled with otherness.
I see you
from across this room
sprawled listless, naked
shaved, pained, unpainted
across a stripped canvas
bed, your honey brambled
stately head tipped starkly toward
the wall. If you raised
your dainty finger to deign
“No, not you, that other
one. Him. He whom I
have chosen. He in whom I
delight. He who touches
my most secret, inner
parts.” your finger would not
soar from nothing or from
no one. Not at all.
I am not your little boy
too wide-eyed, needy, coy
to follow your wry smile
where it leads
behind a shadow or a door…
and yet, how hard to read
the heaviness of your half-clenched hand
the brutal in-sweep of your thigh
your wrenched expression’s stifled
sigh, your lifeless lidded answers:
“I’ve no idea” and
“No reason why”
But blame, if I take it,
does what? Turns an imagined
Him into some vile hero, turns
you into a wretched Her
against me, turns
my unguarded wants into
spirals of hard words, stony
resentments, pithy refusals:
a plate of broken strings,
a mass of cold, bland noodles
heaped with flabby meatballs of shame.
Even then I’d still have my endless devouring,
this dark frenzy of insufferable questions.
I could dip my fingers into the cool
slippery strands of your blonde hair and
yank, howling “What have you done with her?
That girl who loved me? Where…?”
but won’t when
neither of us knows.
I think
she slipped
away by phases
through a maze of other games
forking out from my own trail littered
with the wreckage of flat old in-jokes, same
stale Xbox afternoons, untasted beer and
the clinking shell of laughter’s
last frail
echo.
It doesn’t matter that I almost
understand.
I hate her
that lilting drifter who left me here --
too quickly divorced from my childhood playgrounds
still clutching for broken, yellow crayons
bobbing and wobbly as a rubber duck maverick
determined to crash and drown --
no longer a hapless, orphaned boy
but still not yet a man.
------
"All the darkness in the world
cannot put out the light
of one candle"
|
Sun on a Mountain
