Band-Aids, Duct Tape, and Other Things that Hold Us Together

Band-aids over bruises,

Duct-tape shut the clean cuts.

Baggy jeans and

Bag of pencil sharpeners and ball point pens.

Someone once told me that habits never die,

They sleep in the muscle like a parasite,

Like bacteria dormant in ancient ices.

I can feel this eternal call through the sinew of my hands

Like an earthquake. Through my frosty ventricles like a

Toothache.

I am always learning something. 

Count four on my fingers,

Each digit represents a bigger slash.

Now, five.

An entire hand to hold above my head in class

So I can ask

“Why?”

I thought there was a limit to the amount of pain poured into

The wax mold of a chest cavity.

A level measured in volume, if not in recognition –

I am learning I was wrong.

I think I will overflow this time.

I think my ribs will break one by one,

My arm snaked about my torso to hold the pieces together.

Nary afraid of splitting skin,

But horrified lest my chest cave in.

Mary, holy mother

How many scars splattered your skin

Like lead paint from the bearing and tearing of

A holy thing?

Mary, holy mother

Did you scar your son as well?

Not stigmata but something quieter.

Someone once told me that

Life is only violence, a knife cut from alpha

To omega.

Mother to child and back and forth, the rocking

Of an unsteady sailboat upon the sea,

Cresting with the ripple tide until

We have all lost too much blood –

Blood like a river.

Styx.

Rushing towards my ankles. I cannot swim.

Seaweed, the texture of sinew

To pull me to an abyss,

Seaweed, dark as gloved hands to twist

About my feet like a lover’s kiss.

You can learn to love the knife like

Lungs can learn to love the smoke.

Mother, Mary, Mama,

I tell you, I was once blessed too

With feathered wings and peach-fuzz shins,

And clear like the dew on the grass.

It took twenty-three years

Of slashes, and lashes,

And some sneaker sawing,

(sawing away at my skin, at my wings, at my weight, at my will).

But now my wings lie amputated

Name me ground-given. Fallen thing.

Count five large hacks at the joints,

Five like a fist,

Slashes like the back against linoleum,

Slashes like broken drywall,

Slashes like the steps of premeditation,

Slashes like horse blinders,

Slashes like a shared bed, and

Red

Red

Red.

They did most of the work for me, you know.

I only needed to push a little deeper,

Easy then,

To hear the snap of avian

Angel

Bird

Bones

Breaking

Like so many chicken bones above my grandmother’s sink.

Don’t blame my grandmother

She didn’t know like no one else knew.

Blame all of them, none of them Judas, but something more silent,

A lack of squinted eye

No scrutiny to blow my house of sticks and spit into

The gutter.

If someone took the time

To look

They would have seen.

But glances are at heavy cost – I know.

The myopy of family

And how many gold coins they have cost me!

I have none to lay on my eyes as I finally sleep.

Born a bastard,

Alive a failure,

Dead a pauper.

Mother Mary, Mama, Mommy,

How many hacks like tally marks -

How long did it take you?

The rip of a womb thirty years vacated,

Did that crack your wings too?

I’ve carried my feathers to the ocean, let

It wash me away too, but not yet.

I stand ankle deep and stuck in

Ancient ice

And sinew

And lover’s seaweed,

And the grip of five fingers,

And the chain of my broken rosary,

And the jaws of a parasite,

I will never leave.

But under my Band-aids and Duct tape,

The blood of my wounds runs red like a river.

Can you hear it?