A Mother

I would avoid being around when she is

A resentment spoils our air.

My cold glass words are her punishment

For birthing a universe of human mess.

That I must live with.

For making me feel like a mistake she’d made.

I was.

She and my ‘father’ were enemies for a while.

The mistake was another man.

He suffocated her with words like molasses.

And just as sickly.

But a woman who wakes in the morning

To find pieces of herself falling in her hands

Loses the discernment from her tongue.

And a boy who knows how to build those pathetic fragments

Into an ornament unto his ego

Will be a momentary saviour .

So, as they say the universe is

I was birthed out of chaos.

And when the young man’s fingers became tired

of holding those pieces up

She returned home.

With a bounty of strange sorrow and new shame.

Many years later she finally spoke with words

The reason for the disjointed

And fractured bones holding our ‘family’ together.

I wouldn’t blame her for the mistake.

I don’t blame her for compromising herself for a semblance of love

Few women haven’t.

My special malice for her is for all my years

Of treating me as merely a flesh covered reminder

Of a time when life showed her she was unwanted.