The Soma Of History

Today, I found a soma in my skirt pocket, dead flowers scattered in my
barnet and six wild horses somewhere underneath my heart.

I was in candlelit lavender bath and his limbs were entangled with
mine: how many hand-holds will it take for you to love the way I do
anything?

And then I was home, and he told me that I am skin and bone, that I am
bruised and scarred, that I am too quiet, too clumsy, too odd, and I
couldn't tell if those words made me feel sad or just a little smaller
inside myself.

Sometimes, I am reticent and self-hamstrung.
I am a lake lacking ocean limbs; I have rabbit lungs and morphine as
my evening tea.
But you don't know;
You never knew;
That I take six pills every morning in an attempt to invoke my
existence, and to remind myself that ache is only bone-deep.

I once knew a girl who had deer-does in her eyes before she didn't,
and the boy who hates my sleep-pale bones had seen my face in the
dark.

All I am now is a complexity of moon dust: indiscernible and
unwitnessed. I wish he had seen the soul that I've been inhabiting for
twenty summers, that he would've touched my loveless limbs the way he
fondled upon his mother's fingertips when he was 5.

Today, I found a soma in my skirt pocket, dead flowers scattered in my
barnet, and six wild horses somewhere underneath my heart. I tried to
outreach for him, but he was somewhere else.