ruins.

Am I to live the same three lives over and over again? Run so far from my childhood, I run right back into it. Silvertone. In pants, a style which is a decade too late. Circling the drain, circling the hole, into the ground, pipes running aside along. Shear my hair from inconvenience in quick and rare event. Like my head is a garden and we doing fall clean-up. It's a mother heavily sighing and frustrated to handle the torturous task of caring for your child again. You can suck the joy out of a child till she can't find it again till she's forty. Not get the thing she wants, not because there is not enough money or it is impractical, but because it is a shame to want to begin with. Funny how you don't want me. You didn't want me. But there I was. You had me. Maybe that is why I don't get the thing I want. I would rather want and not have. Than to not want and have. Resent it's presence. Negative. But not like the opposite of positive. Negative like film. Like photos taken in the painful burn of summer sun-heated cement bench. Slab. Outside a restaurant. I am pulling down my skirt hem and pulling up my tank top. I suddenly, aware, of how the dress code haunts me. Twelve and cut down to size already. Life needs a dress code so I can feel prepared and ready and able. I need a short leash. I need reeled in. I need manhandled back into the box. Just dip back into the groove, stencil and blueprint. The scaffold and foundation sturdy and ready. Easy to ride the train when the tracks been laid. Castlestone. Just repeat what's been done before. My mother built this. But it's my job to maintain. Maple steeple. I need to be caged. Kept on track, on task, on top of it. Keep at bay those teddy bear blues. Too loud. Too excited. Too sullen. Too quiet. Calm down. Fit into the spaces available. Fit into life like rags between cracks in the log cabin. Stop up the drafts. The chill which scrapes along the floor. Drags along the floorboards to bare toes vulnerable. Smaller and smaller still. Wad in the cheek. Punched in the guts. I punched myself in to guts today. It stayed the same. Gold temple. I am grape globes. I am glass. I am fragile while it lasts. Stand here on the ruins. The past hasn't passed. The roads cars drive on, on top, like icing, on the Roman roads, cakepop.