In the night you wait to fall asleep And your heart beats, beats, beats. Picking apart everything, over the years Hasn’t made you a friend of the mirror. Like fleeting sentences and Words that will never leave our throats You are stuck But you try to find Hope.
“Never give up!“--well at least you tried You thought nothing was Worse than saying goodbye You thought suffocating your face Would muffle your cry But you have no Hope.
So now you walk a dead man’s line, Travel his steps so you feel alive, Find the distinction in place and time, And search for some Hope.
The clock ticked past twelve And she waited on the stairs Avoiding the sound She’d been hearing for years. Her mother’s soft skin, pale but blushed brown, Hit with his hand Then a thud and she’s down.
It begins with his bottle Pulled out of the fridge. Then a few hours later It always ends with her face to his fist
She’s tried to save her, to pull her away, But it always turns into his hand Meeting her own face. So she waits on the stairs, by the door Ready to escape, But when the whimpering stops It’s usually safe.
She crawls back into bed, piling books at her door Knowing she’ll wake if they fall to the floor. If they fall, then, again, she’s stuck all alone in her room With the monster much scarier than one from her book’s lagoon.
Times, Sometimes
He was the type of man that Preached “You're Welcome,” after sex. That asked incessantly after the matter, How good did he make you feel?
He was a man who kept his self consciousness Masked with a physique of a Spartan warrior and the Help of a flask, kept at all times between the threads Of his faded Levi’s jeans.
Had he stopped to realize That self assurance had nothing to do with the world, Only with his own mind, He would have seen the beauty of the sand Caressing his toes, the sun warming his Body after a rainfall.
There were times, sometimes, his grandfather would say, "Art is just an excuse for people who can’t see the beauty In each and every moment, they think they need to create the beauty That already fucking exists. But self consciousness, boy, That is for narcissists, that is much worse. That is for a person that thinks about his own existence Over the world’s."
So he would neatly fold away his emotions Into a little cube and tuck them In a small pocket of his brain, To be sure that they remained secret, and He saw them, many times, in the form of White powder, lingering on his nostrils As the numbness crawled in.
© Jessica Wolcott