Intentions

stylistic challenge given to me by a friend

Death is semi-deciduous, following you
around like it was lost and you dared to feed it
crawling with its pincers pinching and its mandibles
laughing;

just how much of your soul did you give It?

you were eight, and you were at
school like the good little girl that you were and you
found the dead bird in the yard.
Curiosity picked it up and empathy cradled it in your arms, stroking still feathers
that rustled underneath your fingertips. Its eyes were still 
open, forced to watch the evils of the world, even 
having passed from it,

yet they seemed so familiar, like a mother who was never there, but abandoned you for death. there was sentience in death. there was kinship.

and you just stared and stared, and suddenly, it wasn’t
dead anymore, and it stared back.
and its eyes felt your own with an anger you’ve never known. you looked at your hands, unsure where the blood had come from. 

You never told anyone, not until you were
fifteen and the world seemed like it was collapsing with
the man’s lungs as you cradled his head to your chest on a street and streamed
tears down onto his face like heaven’s last rain, and you whispered,
“I wish I could make things right,
that things would be right, and things wouldn’t die, and they would live
like I wanted them to,”
but they didn’t, and they died in your hands like you were guilty, 

even though you didn’t know what happened, and were too numb to find out. his is a tarnished memory, all because of you, and so the guilt lives on. you never made him worth it.

and the tears didn’t seem to stop, not until you were twenty-three
and too numb to
feel them streaming and weening off the
tips of your nose and chin and neck, and crashing stalacite-like while
you refused to acknowledge the voice chiming your
father’s death, who had promised to never die.

death drowns promises in itself, chokes them on its essence and laughs as they decay beside it. promises are trophies to be broken, and nothing more.

You never went to the funeral; lies didn’t deserve 
your tears, and so you cried at home with the lights 
off, and the house dark
so he couldn’t see you through the ceiling.

and bitterness washed away every good memory you might have had as you rubbed them from your eyes, red and raw with salt: it tore at your skin. 

Forgiveness came only when death reached into your spine
and plucked nerves and bone with its spiderling fingers and birthed pain 
in a car crash-- when the glass hit 
your face like crystal tears you realized just how close death is

and that maybe you’d wasted all this time in hate, 
and that maybe, no one ever means to die. 

Author's Note

I chose L for the picture because well... he's awesome. :)

Reviews

[Seshat Nidaba]

This reads like a freakin novel! Which is amazing, to conceive in a poem, of such a thing.

The mark of a good writer is a good ending, and that was as good as it gets. /99

[William]

I am shocked that this has no reviews. I might be possibly easy to please when it comes to poetry, but I couldn't find a single flaw in this poem. The subject matter, the format, the way some of the sentences are broken where others are whole--it all fits together perfectly like a jigsaw of poetic perfection. :D Should I stop now?

Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed it, and yes, L is awesome.
--William