Pain is mulled so many ways.
Sometimes we lift a glass to our mouths
Full of the warmth of the world;
The golden mango lozenge of our Rey
Melting into pools of fleshy peach, soft
Motherly pastels that draw in the fluttering
Solitude of dusk, the velvet curtains let loose from where
They gathered, against
The warm swell of her bosom.
When your eyes drift out of focus,
Seep a bit at the corners, when your heart fills
To burst for the humanity you’ve won and
Lost and are yet to
Lose; are perhaps even yet to
Choose.
The cold pinpricks, bars of blue light, blur
Into an impressionist painting, mottled rainbows, swirling
dust,
Careening lanes into unfathomable blackness -
When bearing and bracing
Trying, trying again, pit some divine order
Against the strain of your back your
Withering, warping spine.
Sculpted like a towering orange sand dune,
That grips the earth with spindly legs that
Soon crumble into the fingernail beds of your
Grandmother’s yellowed hands;
Withered under the burdens of generations,
Of genealogy,
Of pretending.
Weathered tracks, rent by time
Things about you I don’t understand;
Is this allowed? The way I bear, I brace against
The pain of your solitary libations is when I
Run away from it all. Tiptoe out of your peripheral vision,
Hide the ache growing in my chest, behind my throat,
Burning beneath my eyeballs,
That vitriolic mix of angry and sad.
Throw it into the ancient sands and minerals that shaped the
earth
Into ragged bloody-knuckled hills, curling
Into the quiet palm of our valley.
That jolt each ragged breath out of my gullet like
A confession ripped, not coaxed,
With belches of tears, a silent scream that escapes
Tempered, worn to heaves.
My mouth dries and fills with the cotton of
The earth as I feel your eyes sink farther back into the
Ridge of your brow, beneath the elegant dip of your mouth
I could only convince myself were curving up beneath
The perfect heart of your porcelain face,
The rise of your cheeks into a billion seams and tributaries
Around eyes dark like pools.
I convince myself I see an ache that
Even you don’t know.
Sometimes I run to the hills,
Sometimes I run away from the people I love; trip,
Fall to the stifling cave of jagged, dissonant
edges
Suffocate slowly and silently into a detached otherworldly
oblivion;
And sometimes you choose your own damn path
By raising a cold bottle, a discreet opaque glass to your
Plum-sweet baby lips, your ass planted
Firmly on a threadbare couch as you
Imbibe hours of mindless television.
And nights of mindless buzzing, like a million bees
Fill your every rugged crevice; while the
Valley wraps you into her withering palm,
Into her swelling mother’s breast, into her
Dark, open arms.
