The product of strange thoughts over breakfast

[kandake]

Bonewife

As I cradle these bones in my hands,
working out their origins,
assigning them names,
I ask myself again
why all my loves are broken...
Why my world is full of monuments
marking self-dug graves
where men come to willingly inter
their casualties, their corpses, their ghosts...
why my soil seems littered
with half-dead husks
and gory remainders -
why I seem to always be stumbling on bones...

I'm no angel;
I don't exonerate
or negate
or breathe new life into long-lost limbs...
So why these offerings?
Why this willingness to provide
these injured and rotting fetishes,
to lay beside me these creaky cast-offs of sacrifice?
I know the answer before I ask of me,
although I despise that which I know:
Because everyone is broken.
Some of us are simply better at
tying the pieces together
and shambling along with our lives...
We are all wicker men,
sticky, combustible,
hastily-tied and fragile.
I know this, and know it well;
I've danced with stick figures,
dined with scarecrows,
held dolls to my bosom and cried,
picked up more pieces than I can count,
and I've laid to rest those I could not re-attach;
I've given last rights with reverence
to an army of the dead.

But I am tired now, and aging.
I am too old for this,
or perhaps I'm finally too young.
I find I'm tired of tripping,
falling over pieces of you,
pieces you've left behind,
my own clockwork body
connecting in the dark,
spilling over your leg or your head
or your heart
left lying in my path,
to catch me unawares.
The mother in me responds,
"This does not belong here!
Put these things away
before someone gets hurt!"
The girl in me, already hurt,
holding myself together,
cradling my own rattling skeleton,
is angry,
blames you for the fall,
you careless caretaker
of your own scattered remains.