Bloodstone & Bicycles

Memories

Broken ghosts

Sticking sharp shards of suffocation

Every time I try to move

Every time I try to breathe

Labrynthine vacuum of antiquity

I shift identities

Morph into other names

But the scars wrapped around my face are still the same

As that sunny day

Kickball field in fourth grade.

My fault we lost the game,

Head hung low, full of shame.

A lousy kicker, couldn’t run fast

Hell, I couldn’t run at all

For my efforts

A bucket full of lonely recesses

Running to escape ridicule

Refuge retrieved behind oak tree I call friend

“Scarface”

“Frankenstein”

Monikers of monsters and bad men

Draped small shoulders

Pinafores of lead

None eviscerated like the name that day

On the green grass in 4th grade.

Paul Chackel

Red hair

Bucked teeth

Freckled, pasty skin

A competitive streak

A boy who would tear flies from their wings

Had a need to lord over smaller things

I, weak monster fly,

Can’t look in his face

Spit in his eye

When he blames me for our team’s loss

Branding me with that word I abhor most:

Handicapped

This utterance

Virulent beyond rape

Whisky bottles

And gender confusion like waves

Great tsunami filled with rage,

I still see his green eyes

Feel the spit of his breath

Every time I offer

Myself to a test

It is this demon

Standing between me and the diamonds

Between me and Brandon’s bed

He lies in east coast basement

Calling me late at night not understanding

Why he alone

With his massive heart and occasional arms around me

Cannot heal this hurt

I hunger for

The me that was

That last summer in Arcata

In love singing in the racquet ball courts

Voice bouncing like river in rainfall

Or first lone desert dance, encapsulated in flames

The stars my only witness

I kill Paul Chackel all the time

I’ve beheaded

Garroted

Cooked and cleaved

But like Freddy Krueger

He rises from the dead

And there’s that word ringing in my head

Still sending me,

Sobbing ‘I can’ts’ to the bathroom

I ran that day like I didn’t know I could

To bury young humility in bathroom stall

Hot, tear-streaked face pressing cold, pink-tiled wall

Mama took me home

Washed my wounds

But helpless to cleanse my infection

Twenty years past

Sour rejection

Still stings my throat eyes teeth

Every time I try to move

Every time I try to breathe

Menaced green eyes

Regard me as rancid meat

Something to be thrown away.

Through tears

I learn to trust

This mass of cells

It can dance,

Stretch

And stand on one foot

I attempt the long-awaited,

Much anticipated two wheels

Instead of three

And who is there to welcome me

And remind me of my history?

Horrific serpent

Red hair

Bucked teeth

Poised between me and the diamonds

But this time,

I have a secret weapon

I call her ‘losing fear’

Her blade patient, polished bloodstone

Sharp like rattlesnake fangs,

Splintered shards of broken ghosts

She has wings and fists

And she

Doesn’t lose

Her battles.

©Harvey Rabbit 2005