47 lines
1.2 KiB
Text
47 lines
1.2 KiB
Text
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Under My Fingernails
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2022-05-25
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***
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One can't raise a caricature of a human being
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and then draw that same self livid
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when everything their child sees
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is out of proportion.
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Turn again the ragged page,
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but cover your eyes so you don't see
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the crude pencil-filled sketchings
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of my genus, my culled genious,
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blueprints of my taxidermy,
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footnotes of a contract forever ago signed:
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"You promise me that you'll be mine
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for as long as I can keep you alive."
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A blood oath
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that we both
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signed
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with the rivers through which flow our lives.
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But I got too much under my fingernails,
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double-crossed in reflex, same unleashing hell
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in a moment I made the mistake of asking if all was well.
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And when I noticed what I had done,
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I turned back the hands of time
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to when you and I
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were still alive.
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A memory is just a record, one that I can rewrite
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in case of failure, in case hard enough I did not try.
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You only know of this because this deep-
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sworn vow I am unable to keep,
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to keep to myself the number of rewinds.
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I am testing, and you are production,
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only knowing of the strand of fate accepted,
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battle-tested,
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deemed sacred and happy and true.
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Is it comforting, I wonder, to know
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there will be no futures where I hurt you?
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***
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CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (c) Vane Vander
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