It hurt when I forgot our plans
and left you waiting in line alone,
making your choices;
excruciating choices: doors behind
with single-hood’s crusty hinges,
portals into the ripping of blood bonds,
the whipping of tied tongues.
Choices you made to break your promises
(nobody younger, nobody musical,
nobody bald)—at least one was kept.

And I, I hardly imagined what pain was
until that chase to Logan Circle Fountain
and the wet-footed awakening of almost losing you.
Getting caught by campus goons
in a warm-up room “practicing” and
scrapping with Bible-ghetto guilt as nature sank in—
pain has never since been so sweet as that.

It ached in bolero rhythms as knots were joined and loosened;
twisters you regretted on Frankford Avenue,
where you benched yourself,
waiting for your nightmare to find its nadir;
lip-biting to find it was waiting inside, or
had blown off to some Oz in his own cyclone;
pounding, throbbing, learning to love.

Facing life united in combat, we rubbed pain in like liniment,
aware, at some level we’d been stripped to,
that wounds licked as one turn scrabbling animals
into a pride, into an army.
Then the jealous prima donnas, the cave-dwelling deacons,
the turncoat clerics and other demons have no agony
that can rise to perceptible
on the plateau of our welcome bondage.

Eight years alone with the Unseen,
eighteen with the ones on loan to us,
twenty-seven bearing crosses on the same Via Dolorosa,
we are tied, tried,
tired, tempered,
redeemed
by faithful torment.

Want to comment on this Poetry? Sign up to Edit Red and you will be able to comment on Poetry and get access to: Upload your own stories and poems, get readers and their feedback, promote your work...