Our Issues

Your heart grew up in a black wooden box
and thought it fabulous,
                    its world of
                    right angles,
                    wood grain,
                    and eternal night.
It hated me when I bored the hole
that let the sun singe its eyes, cook its skin,
when rain collected the dirt on its skin
in a puddle beneath its feet and said:
“look how dirty you are, foul thing.”

It hated and
hated and
still hates,
      always crawling
                under any
                    box it finds.

I kicked it                       
out of its hiding place.
It ran out howling, hating and being
hated by everything:  pigeons swerved to       on it
                                                         shit              
wasps went kamikaze on it, black widow spiders
dropped   e      
              g
              g
              s    in its ear while it slept, wild
horses made love to its rear,
trees lashed it, roses
turned their scent away, woodpeckers
pecked at its skull, vampire bats
booked dinner tables on its neck, alley cats
sang at night to wake it, salmon
swam in the water of its eyes, flapping
their fat tails against the iris; most humans
ignored it, some were slow clapping.
But your heart        is
my          heart
and if it seeks eternal night
then
        let
             us
                 crawl
                          under the blackest, blackest box
                          that we can find and cry         

fabulous.