New poem: Under My Fingernails

poetry/u/under-my-fingernails.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,46 @@
+Under My Fingernails
+2022-05-25
+
+***
+
+One can't raise a caricature of a human being
+and then draw that same self livid
+when everything their child sees
+is out of proportion.
+
+Turn again the ragged page,
+but cover your eyes so you don't see
+the crude pencil-filled sketchings
+of my genus, my culled genious,
+blueprints of my taxidermy,
+footnotes of a contract forever ago signed:
+"You promise me that you'll be mine
+for as long as I can keep you alive."
+
+A blood oath
+that we both
+signed
+with the rivers through which flow our lives.
+But I got too much under my fingernails,
+double-crossed in reflex, same unleashing hell
+in a moment I made the mistake of asking if all was well.
+And when I noticed what I had done,
+I turned back the hands of time
+to when you and I
+were still alive.
+A memory is just a record, one that I can rewrite
+in case of failure, in case hard enough I did not try.
+
+You only know of this because this deep-
+sworn vow I am unable to keep,
+to keep to myself the number of rewinds.
+I am testing, and you are production,
+only knowing of the strand of fate accepted,
+battle-tested,
+deemed sacred and happy and true.
+Is it comforting, I wonder, to know
+there will be no futures where I hurt you?
+
+***
+
+CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (c) Vane Vander