I have been thinking a lot
lately
about my youth
about how once someone called me
a fragile little thing,
and how I liked that then
but now I know what they really meant
was that my romanticism
was a sickness,
one that was tender
at all of its corners but
spiraling at its core
and if you split the nucleus
right open
you would have found:
1. shrines to what it was like to truly see you
2. artifacts of loving too many people
in the same space and time
3. monuments built on the notion
that you can't love someone
without using your hands first
4. a lot of things I fought hard to forget
5. contour drawings of your pronated forearm
or one curled hair on the edge of your face
6. everyone I have ever loved melding together
into a universal thing, a universal You
7. everything outside of that running together
like wild horses
8. a storm in which the lightning
repeatedly struck
the dendrites of youth
9. how every time it hit,
the synapses of discovery would weep
at what it was like (see: wholeness, coming home)
to hold you
10. all the pain sitting against my spine
as she became more and more sick,
more and more sick, it shifted and grew
11. (into) infinite loneliness
12. (and into) infinite sorrow
13. all the hormones of growing up
14. the fucked up dance I did where you were not
a partner but a fixture
15. all my nerve splitting me right open
16. the poisonous things that spilled right out:
17. power
18. and control
19. self-righteousness
20. and deceit
21. an audible heartbeat
drowning out every other sound
22. how I thought I knew what It All Meant
23. how I really knew nothing
writing as a question and not as an answer,
writing as an exercise and not as a cure
and
an unrecognizable
ugliness that reached
like cold hands into the
tender warm places and
hollowed them,
picked all the meat from the bone
but
Who I was Then
and
Who I am Now
are not
Who I Have To Be
and I am not a fragile
little thing
anymore
I am not a little thing
anymore
at all