Author: kelly

Continue reading “sixteen” →

see, every time i rise from the dinner table

i leave a battlefield behind.

bones plucked, strewn, broken;

spit showering down like hail.

what is otherwise something sacred,

really is a waste of space.

they tell me to pray about love, but if they

can’t tell me that we‘re something real

then that’d just be blasphemous.

someday always, and

eventually diffuses into a myth.

so instead i build a militia of something less.

something less than divine intervention,

or rhapsodic songs about soulmates.

because i know better,

because i am a soldier,

yet

this is why they call me a monster.

Doom like a vulture’s cry—a sputtering

flame choking on honest

water; a sea wave that stills mid-air,

crest and trough multiverses apart.

I think I saw it first, brimming in the

pools of your concealed pout.

You can’t fool me: there is stubborn moss

growing within the cracks of your voice,

your eyes bruised and melted,

making me feel like a wayward child

seeing his mother cry for the first time.

This is my last plea to you:

pat down the last few slabs of earth

into my screaming mouth and let

the grass grow from my bones. After all,

what else am I, but something

gnawed and spat out on mosaic floors—

A toothpick on a chocolate sample

Once craved.

Twice forgotten.

Never loved.

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