October 12th, 2021
On the crest of his twenty second birthday, he dragged a dying man from his vehicle. The sound of grinding metal still echoed in my head when I heard it through the wall, as I stood on the front porch watching. From his mother's own mouth, it was the fourth person under his belt. A fourth person's blood on this young man's hands. On my baby's hands. Yet if he hadn't run barefoot across two front yards to get to the man, he'd be dead. He'd be nothing. His parents would be mourning over the grass he bled out on. Life isn't fair in the way he wants it to be, and nothing I say will shift his way of thinking. What the world has shown this man is what he will always see. The universe has been unkind to him, giving him a faulty body directed by a faulty brain. But his hands are strong enough to lift other men, without the discomfort of getting dirty. Without a second thought, another man's blood covers my baby's hands, and he comes back to me to go to sleep for the night. But before slumber finds him, he falls back into me to instead find the fairness and comfort the world neglects to show. He wonders how he found it in love, and I wonder just the same. The blood on his hands is the blood on mine. Any hour of the day, any time he needs me to, I will stand over the sink with our hands in the ceramic bowl, staining the bathroom with life, washing blood down the drain.
R.K.
YOU ARE READING
Holeheart
Thơ caI am the forgiver. I am the destroyer. I'm not at fault, but I deserve to be. Poetry and Prose Volume V 2021 DISCONTINUED
