Tag: girl

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I Don’t Cry Much Anymore

My womanhood thus far has been roses and scorn,

full of the trials of not-texting-back and

the chalky taste of multivitamins and not fitting in.

 

“I am …”, I thought at ten, “… a shy girl,”

that’s me, “a shy girl who likes animals.”

 

And now I’m not sure if I like men.

Or this* man,

or graduating early,

or getting too thin.

 

I was taught the subtle art of

arched back, chin up,

one eye on the rear-view kids,

one eye along the road ahead;

trained in graceful knuckles run across

a loved one’s head.

I’m an expert in quiet frustration,

in keeping it in.

And I stopped believing in pain

when my mother caved in.

 

I learnt to worry at the door,

and on the phone,

and in the car.

I learnt the colors of the rainbow

on my knuckles.

I learnt the value of

women,

but most of all

I learnt that

tenderness

is spread much too thin.

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Wild-Girl Heart

Clawing your way through a wooded town

on a rare day of autumn heat won’t get you anywhere,

I think you’ve forgotten.

You’ve been drug away from the forest floor,

eyes a knotted, snotty mess and hair in your teeth before;

why can’t you give it a rest with your wild-girl heart?

 

Dried leaves crumple in your clammy fists,

a flurry of red-orange flakes with edges like broken glass

unstick themselves from your palms and float down,

never to be reassembled

or remembered;

crushed in vain by a girl with a wild heart and hands of a man:

even holy water could not cleanse the things you touched back then.

 

You bring rock to trunk to scratch the features of your face

into the soft clay bark of the old oak tree.

Naturally, the disfigured tree disfigured you;

and for the rest of the days that its roots burrow down into the forest floor,

your folded jowls and pinching eyes will grace the clearing’s door.

As such your face wanders into country lore

and you are remembered as a monster;

Old Hag of the Hill who ate wild-girls’ hearts.

 

Too late, the crack of guilt lashes down on your hunched back,

the rock slips from your grip and you follow it down;

finally collapsed in this lawless wooded town.

 

You know the hours will pass and the searchlights will find you.

Questions will be asked and avoided, repeated and half-completed;

half-sense words building sense and sentences in the moonlight.

You’ve all been through this before.

 

The forest knows how to wear its destruction well,

that is to say, it hides it all;

little do the occult ad-ults know what wreckage goes unmanned here;

the wrecked remnants of your wild heart.

 

Years pass in the forest, and your tantrums subside.

No-one asks why, but you remember,

wild-girl at heart,

that night you tore your wild heart into pieces

and planted its meaty pulp in the roughed-up forest floor.