the beekeeper.

wire vs musician.

i want you to know that i tried.
i really, really tried this time,
but the small red boy inside of my tummy told me:
"listen, you are lying."
and for a while,
i didn't know what he meant by that.
for a while, i thought he was referring to my paternal displacement,
but no,
no,
that wasn't the scapegoat this time.
that wasn't the answer.

he was talking about the wire.

you know the wire.

it was barbed.

it was sharp.

it was rusty.

but even though it screamed peril and harbored clumps of hair from the men you knew had been enveloped by it before you,
you wanted to touch it.
perhaps that was an understatement:
you wanted to feel it.
you wanted to run your bony hand across the twisted hooks and feel nothing but ecstasy.

but that's not how the life of a musician works.

you didn't have farmer's hands,
you had delicate ones;
ones that picked ukuleles and guitars and tickled the ivories from time to time.
honey, you had office hands.
the only callouses you bore were those from writing and from strumming.
you were no farmer.

you were, however, stubborn like one,
which both pissed me off
and made me want to touch you more.
i liked that a lot about you.
but i never liked it enough to allow it to persuade me
to kiss your frets and whisper acoustic warnings that hummed,
"B
A
D."

those were the only notes you needed to know in the song you were writing about me.
i was B-A-D.

baby, i was B-A-D to the bone,
but instead of punk diamond-studded jackets
or black boots laced up to the knee,
i was leather bondage around wrists and throats;
i was the gag pressed against your best friend's tongue
and i was the belt your father loosened all too often.

i was B-A-D alright,
and the wire screamed that.
with every passing day that i allowed you to believe i loved you,
i flooded my fence with salt water,
and i let it dry,
rust,
full of toxins that could lock a grown-man's jaw.
the wire grew critically dangerous,
and all you wanted to do was reach for it more.

why are you so obsessed with self-destruction
that you would allow me to cling to your skin until there was no more to rip from your bones?
why are you so infatuated with my eyes and my freckles that you would try to connect the constellations with your own blood,
your own fruit punch that i would gladly guzzle to keep myself from shriveling into nothing?

i
am
B-A-D.
your guitar strings will mold into barbed wire
and i will scream at you to cough up those crows that will peck my eyes.
i will cry for you to make me go blind.
i will yell, i will force you to play,
i will make you shimmy like the Coffin Dancer,
i will demand of you the world.

i'm a vine with metal thorns and you're
TOO GODDAMN GOOD TO BE CUT LIKE THIS.
your blood sugar is too low to allow me to ravage your sweetness,
your dignity is too fragile to let yourself be flattened by my kneecaps.

next time you play,
serenade the nurses that tend to your wounds.
do not sing to the cause of your pain.
do not try to swoon my shiny rope,
my glamourous noose.

musician, i love you,
but not nearly enough to stop the barbs from decapitating you.