Sometimes I stumble and find myself
lurking near some root of regret:
memory of a time when all I had to do
was apologize, swallow pride, walk up stairs
to dinner, to renewed laughter, to life.
I never made this choice, I whisper
in a panic--first in alarm and desperation
at what hellscape I have unfurled but
then in fear and recognition of the thing
from which I have been hiding all along.
There never was a time in which I said,
"No longer that, now this!" and felt joy:
neither at the start, nor at the end of--
I only know I longed for what it could be
and later dreaded climbing up those stairs.
What's in the cellar can't be killed:
not so much because of what it is but I
cannot even face it; I have never faced it;
I am too much a coward to even observe
the great harm my cowardice has caused.
For example, here is a girl who will live
her whole life never remembering what it was
to have Mom and Dad downstairs together,
maybe listening to the radio, maybe laughing,
maybe praying together, maybe having wine.
And let us peruse some aisles here of grief:
the secret silent tears young boys have spilled,
nights of agony for some middle-aged woman
who lost her husband to an unobserved thought,
starting over, folding ends upon each other.
Add to the basket this leafing plant of shame,
of dashed expectations and hopes for all who knew
the promise of those earlier years. Emotions peak
and ebb, and sour, and become a blank stare: exactly
how it is I languidly arrived in this dark place.
I'll do it all again. Lazily I raise hopes all around
and lazily I dash them down: on accident, I think,
but never say, as if it mattered. The pain I caused,
I numbly hope will free some souls from this dumb loop.
The root twists into my dry soil and I look away.
Sitting silent, sitting still, eyes unseeing glaze across
a crashing wave of time: I do not move. I do not move,
and even this is causing harm. Glancing up, I glimpse
a child's face; my own young dirty fingers digging dirt--
recalling my small fist's delight in snapping shallow roots--
