What if my mother
Who was gone
Did not warn me about you
And so
In the glib night
As I stood wanting to be plucked
From a latch key evening
The cluck and cacophony of
People filled with water
You circled my arm with a snare
With decision and madness there
Made a drink of me
Threw it down your chain-smoking throat
Carrying me on your back like a crab
We waded shorelines
Rinsing the regret for not being as others appear
Bone straight and glistening in their eagerness
We’d been born jaded and recognized
In the other that temporality
A godless place of zero and
Dirty much used sheets
Absorbing the stink of best intention
It was your howl in my womb and my opening ever trusting
Nothing can be as it says or is
There’s only this
The you of a rough hand holding me down
A choking, painful exorcism
In my nil
The bones just beneath skin
And you letting yourself in
After hours
A weight of assumption
More honest for its lack of anything
You do not attempt to please
Or deceive
For ours is not a caring place
Only savagery and hurt exist to sate
The otherwise empty arms of loving