I, when I was young,
Kissed with unwise lips,
My mother’s face with the wit
Of a child; ready to believe
And to let sink into my mind, beliefs,
As oil accepts all comers, swallowing them whole.
But little did I know
That my thoughts, being made of oil
Had, through my mother’s toil,
Left a jerry-can trail of love that,
Once either side was incensed,
Would set the two of us ablaze.
So whenever my mother claimed
Without creating the fact that her love
Was an unconditional one,
A benevolent one,
A radiant one,
And that I was to love her, because she was my mother:
Well, that radiance splashed us instead
Into a pandemonium of sudden color;
Our faces red with the wasteful squalor of spitted fire,
Our fists black lumps of charcoal, striking at each other,
Gritted teeth forming whitened burnt-out staffs of ash
That had exhausted all of its hard words…
We fought until the weight of all that hate
Swallowed itself and reversed the state
Of the oily slates of my mind and,
Made me as hard as fossil.
Yes, through meteoric flames,
We’d made my childhood extinct.
Now in these days, with a mind hard as stone,
But with at least eyes that are mine own,
I still watch from a distance, her on her Mt. Olympus,
Her raging for company, abandoned Hera, heart ablaze.
And despite all of the scalding burns that scar my bones,
I can’t help but to feel cold.
for the sake of flow 