Bedsheets

The light on our bedsheets is emissary
of more. It hints at the way you will cry
when your mother is buried, 
not from heartbreak
but at the way that you feel 
nothing and then mourn for your 
own heart, forged steel, smoothed 
granite, laid to rest 
so many years ago.
The first time you almost killed your baby brother 
because you hit him so many times
and all you could see was blackness, 
a glorious Spirograph of pain.
The next day, you were late for 4th grade 
because your mother couldn’t drive with so many tears in her eyes.

She told me this story yesterday, your mother, 
regret a coyote loping slowly
across the 40 years between then and now, mangy, flea-bitten
starved to tell someone, anyone
the shameful black truth that has been hiding in her mama heart 
all this time.

I told her I was packing my boxes.

Whispering,  
she tells me that her son is a beast.
That she will never forget how flat your voice
sounded when you answered her questions.
I can’t help it. I am afraid of what’s inside of me.
She will not admit how many times you said these words over the years. 
She says she loves you still and always will
and that she’d hoped I’d quiet the roar.
My own intuition has been telling me to run
since the very first moment I sat across from you.

I did not run and now eight years later,
this light is thick liquid, creeping 
golden and alive
across your rising and falling chest
and it foreshadows the exact opposite of
warm beacon, dripping life, electric
salvation leading homeward.
It pleads
rescue me from the dark.

It speaks of how the gravedigger knocks at your door 
every single week but goes away empty handed 
because you are trembling under the bed blind with rage.

Heartbreak, the way your mouth tastes like pennies for days
no matter how many times you floss and brush.
How you have always known that tears taste like the ocean
and sound exactly like fists landing hard on flesh.
 
You are afraid of everything, most especially yourself.
And rightly so.
Do you remember that scotch filled night in which you told me
that you'd never had kids because you were terrified that they would
turn out exactly like you? I do. 
Why are you so upset?, you asked.
I’ve worked so hard to bring you to this place slowly. 
It sounded like strategy. I remember the hollow places around your 
eyes. The way I felt suddenly cold and unsafe in my own home.
 
I can see you standing there in our kitchen, 
haunted and terrified. 

Terrifying. Your empty eyes.
 
And so I am awake right now, watching the light 
dance across our bedsheets
and I am left wondering if the difference between you
and a serial killer or you 
and a sexual predator is simply fear 
and I am thankful for that. 
Grateful that after all the posturing and bravado, 
all the anger and telling me what the fuck to do, 
that underneath it all 
you are just a coward quaking with fear. 

A small boy afraid of what is inside.

I am not the same anymore. 
I will not be hunted and I will not stand in place
​while you pick me apart.

So I am packing my suitcase and leaving.