Bags of Bones

I think I’ve always struggled with love. I think it’s been one thing in the books I’ve read, the cinematic versions that men and women capture, an all together separate story than the ways in which it has shown up for me. I tend to want the same love you find in poetic pieces, in the bags of bones that people throw around and drone on about. My own experience has been tedious and less than stellar, if I am to be completely honest. My Mother said she loved me, yet threw jars of baby food across the room in my direction when I cried out for sustenance. She burned my hand with the same curling iron she’d use later in the day to primp and polish one look after the other. The knives inside the drawers were used to strip her pound of flesh from my body. I think love is meant for other people at times and that I exist to be cut and quartered, diced and splattered up on walls like canvas, like tapestries. Drawn from one end of the room, draped above a kitchen table with scuffs left from coffee cups, to the other end. Spread thin and silky. When my mother lost me to the state I thought that love was abandonment, this idea reinforced through foster homes that had no clue how to silence a child that sang in wails and distrust. This idea that love was torture came once more when the man that helped create me set his anger on my skin like flaming logs pulled from a quiet fire. In hands that crept around my neck and squeezed like gears that grind and grip, gears meant for distorting dreams. I’d lie awake at night in perpetual distress, displayed to the moon at a strange angle, one that she would have to fight to get just right. There in my bedroom with the window open, she would sift herself through crack and crevice and sit atop my comforter to comfort me. The sun itself seemed eager in approaching when my feet would hit the concrete, Summertime and blades of grass between each toe. I think that love comes in a language that I struggle with. I think that love from others comes rolling off of tongues and lips that lie as if I don’t hold value at the end of things. My Father loved to strike my face and liked the metal parts of belts or wooden spoons or heavy hand. He almost broke my back one sunny afternoon. I’d pronounced my dissatisfaction with the ways in which he treated me and little boys with voices tuned that way must be reminded. Reminded of how great they’ve got it, how things could be much worse, as if they weren’t, as if they kissed my cheek in soft array instead of lashes and scratches that kept me up at night. The sting and redness kept me from my classes, so the books began to pile up and when the Moon saw this she cried out from a place of jealousy. I’d found a place to pour myself that wasn’t somewhere she could reach as easily. I think love has tried to make its way to me a time or two but I was busy bleeding. Busy hiding from this person or that monster, quite curious to if there was a difference in between the two. Busy in complaining, in moaning from the pain that would ensue had I felt like speaking up. I think that love might be the only reason I’m still here, the sole denominator in this problematic existence I find myself in each day and in each night. I long for safety and yet safe is never quite the same from lover to lover, from brother to brother, from moment to moment. I think that war felt closer to the heart than other times. With bombs and bullets and climbing up and down and through the mountains, into valley after valley, out from belly of these beasts. My heart is a tender creature, yet she is callous and creased and porous and pleated. She tosses and turns until the Moon burns her like phosphorous. Until I figure out what love is not, I imagine that I’m doomed and maybe even doom to those who might attempt to show me what it is. I don’t think I care. I don’t think it matters much. Time tends to eat itself in one big circle, tail meeting tongue. I think that I devour everything that fails to stay outside of my reach. I think I pull these things in and dislocate my jaw to swallow whole the foolish. They taste like metal and flesh and when I wipe my lips and chin I see the stains that I have made. Stains of red like those my Mother left, stains that match the colors of the Earth. There’s solace in the peace of the night for maddened men like me but I tend to sleep right through it on my way to find another meal. I think love keeps me at bay at times. Not every flower must be picked, some exist to watch in wonder, to water and replenish. I think I am the love that I have looked for, when I scrape away at people, when I throw back the sheets and Mother Moon is there to see. I think that love is what you do and what you don’t. It’s what you wish for it to be.