The Door

Behind the heavy and worn pinewood door of my childhood memory palace lives a past I faintly see as though it is shrouded in a winter morning mist.

It is a past do not have the heart to bear and

I'd rather let it all slip through my fingers like the grey ocean waves of my youth.

The scratches and grooves on the old pinewood door are emblematic of bruises on tender skin --

Struck and savaged by a senseless and formless rage born of ignorance and mindless thrashes of internalized self haltered that have passed unabated from generation to generation in an alcoholic miasma of misery.

The bloodstains on the door are a monument to pain  

That in a young mind was the meaning of eternity slowly felt in the fearful pause between each fluttering heartbeat of terror.

The screams have long faded to silence  

Their sounds stored in a stygian place so deep and so ancient

They are akin to the tombs of prehistory --  

Bones and spears scattered and collected and gently interred  

While centuries of civilization after civilization were built, layer upon layer, then forgotten by the men and women whose labors brought us worlds completely new.

The screams and blood never fade because the universe is a cold and vast recording device that never forgets and has stored every thought, sound, and act in its eternal architecture.

The pain is never erased.

 "When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things."*

Or so the saying goes  

But we were never children  

We only survived each day  

We did not flourish or thrive  

Born with only a bare will  

To survive.

We never had childish things to put away  

Only scars to hide with humiliation and shame.

One day I'll burn that door to ash  

And scatter its remains under the silver tree  

Near the mounds of

Haphazard graves  

Broken bones  

Empty beer bottles  

And toppled swings.

Larks and sparrows will sing from thin branches  

The water in the creek will gurgle and roil  

Thorny blackberry bushes will bear sweet fruit  

The patches of wild lilac will give off a heady scent  

A full moon will bear witness in heavenly silence.

I'll find a small piece of that child that never was  

Before I too am burned to ash  

And scattered to wind and dust

Forever.