Saturday, November 20, 2010

Day 491: youth (edited)

You were the girl who played all the wrong games too well
Every sport or guitar string
Plucked too perfect
Only added to your walls
The parts of you no one seemed to even want to penetrate
You,
The queer who was never smeared
Across your elementary school field
You were too fast and strong to be caught under dog piles
instead
You played games with words
Spit vocabulary like fag
Just like the rest
You didn’t realize what the word meant yet
or its irony
you didn’t know how it would infect you
lay eggs under your tongue like spiders in your stomach if you slept with your mouth open
you were cautious of all the wrong things then
not of heights
and skaboards
but women
so cautious of them
so afraid to become one
in body
full in breast
and hips
you hid yourself in the hand-me downs of older brothers
Insisted that you didn’t “fit” into the clothes of your females cousins
Even if they were the proper size
So many games you played those days

you were told as a child
that youth was that sour taste under your tongue
the soil under your nails
and broken hearts
walls that crumble
like berlin
but
that it would be the most beautiful time of your life
that growing
and periods
and boobs
those were things to look forward too
count and measure like treasures
against your friends
no one mentioned the tears
how they would lay fire under your skins
or the blood
and saringes
and blades
those were bad words
like, fag should have been
but wasn’t just yet

instead
your Youth was the tears your left on your pillow on your twentieth birthday
When u felt change tangible
Something u could count in 10s
In decades
The empty saringes
And full sharps contaners
Body bruises and tenderness
you see
your youth was a splinter at the back of yourneck
a stiffness in your hips
a sticky taste on your palms
alcohol under your fingernails
santination doesn’t come cheap
or without leaving a stench behind
you carried it like detergent
youth were the truths you hid like
blood under the sheets
its not the same lie
we lay under different worlds
its growing
its different
and your heart
isnt meant to crumble

you wish
someone could have told you
that hearts have to break and rebuild to grow
but that doenst mean to be careless in giving it away
that it should instead be held like china
like the daughtors who shouldn’t have been forgotten or forged into fires

No comments:

Post a Comment