Growing Up

July 6, 2004

To A:

Oh, take a drag and break my heart. You cried these crocodile tears and the blood ran down my legs and pooled all around me. You don't know anything of me and it was a lie was from the start. Your cruel hands perfectly sculpted in black and blue on my wrists and my neck and soul. Please don't pretend to break through my pretences, you didn't ever touch me wear it counts. My protective coating ripped away and tossed aside and yet I knew who you were, even with my innocence crying like a bawling baby, torn and hemorrhaging on the floor. You were not the first my love and could never have been the last. Salvation comes in the strangest forms and the steed isn't always there before we need to be saved. Sometimes it's little but an ambulance screaming in the night to whisk me away, broken, to repair me in some dirty motel room. Or a boy with brown eyes and a poetic hand to share my love of Ginsberg and fuck under Mexican blankets. Maybe a friend who shakes you loose from the grip of Valium and vodka, hurling you into a shower of ice saying, "You fucking bitch, you stupid girl." I will never be as you wanted to see me. Instead I am flawed and ugly and beautiful and full of remorse and never regret. Perhaps one day I will see you on the street and pass you by, not recognizing you because my heart and mind do know you. I imagine a time when I don't break to pieces when I wake in the night, shivering in the deep hot darkness; afraid of those shadows you gave me.