In Which I am Brutally Honest about My Mother
Her eyes blaze with guilt,
and an outrage at being guilty.
Being caught.
I patiently wait for the crows,
who so lovingly printed their feet
on the sides of my mother’s eyes,
to swarm me.
Swallow me whole.
Even when I’m right,
I’m wrong.
But that’s just how it is with drug addicts.
I want to hate her.
I want to deny the human that is littered
across her hands and grey hairs.
I want to erase her from my DNA
and ignore her as she has done to me.
I want to personally lay the burden
of my addictions on to her shoulders,
tell her, ‘you did this to me’,
watch her knees buckle, and then
have the audacity to ask
why she has kneeled.
But I could never hurt her in that way,
so instead I choose to look her in her face,
and ask why she can so easily do this evil
to me.
As a child I would sleep
with my head on her back,
hoping that one day
I could piece her back together.
Love her enough to make her want to change.
I tried to hold her down
like the weight at the end of a balloon,
and yet she always managed to drift.
To this day she calls me ‘baby’.
Speaks in a play voice that tells me she knows she was absent
When I was small enough to look up to her.
She never would mean to hurt me,
But she fails to see the chain reaction.
By bringing drugs and a child into her life,
She made those two companions.
Dope has never touched my lips,
And yet I feel it has taken my life.
I never saw my mother’s downward spiral,
For that was born before I was.
I never saw the light leave her eyes,
For they were dim before I could meet them.
I sometimes wonder,
Would that have made this easier somehow?
If I saw where her passions once lied,
Knew the girl who had dreams,
Would I forgive the woman in front of me now?
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