What makes you
A girl of an era, your era
Never to go back, to days of stillness and infernal din
With memories like scars and stars on her back
Trying to become yourself, fitting outside margins
What makes you
Stare into the still bath water
And see no reflection stare back
When your feet grow callused
From running down the highway at night, high on the allure of escape
This world and its myriad cobalt treasures, tinkling in distant solace
And your fingernails are too long to pleasure yourself in the loneliness of marriage
What makes you
Hearing your daughter turn like a clockface away from you and shut her door
Already a mimick of your own teenager fury
Growing colder the unbled radiator hisses her discontent
And your twice baked hopes, just a yellow mirage
Like last year’s jarred rubbarb absorbing color in their condensed glass
While the mockingbird echoes all the stains you try to scrub gone
Mighty elephants tearing trees in fitful gallop
Don’t hold it against yourself for the secret need to
Be scorched by the lust of a nameless body
Turning the fruit bowls upside down, bruising pears
Knocking dignity from the table, losing your footing
To be gobbled by your uncombed sticky frustration
Stringing her unfertilized seeds into honeyed pearls
Rinse yourself of guilt and shame, the hour has passed
To pretend we’re not all longing for the same taste
Covered piece of ourselves before the descent of ritual and plucked
Meat waiting to be cooked and eaten neatly at seven
With a full bodied Cabernet and fine erthenwear the color of sunset
The badly washed underclothes of your trembled longing
And our error in taming this wild circumference
You rub your thumbs along the groove
Candles sleeping in the truth of their waxy burn
Once when not so long ago
How then now you do not know
Lift yourself from the rut and
Jump into space, letting go
What makes you
Decide death a better bed fellow
Pulled back by your scalp to read the inverse riddle
Than …
Than all you used to believe
Before
Yourself of now and the loss
Of more