I remember you, chaos.
Twisting metal, needles, smoke.
I plant trees of oblivion that grow fruitless, and lay crumbling bricks in the labyrinth I build in my mind.
My eternal oubliette, moist and overflowing with a burgeoning lifebed, a transmutation of decay.
As ever, I'm far too old for this.
Ageing them, and ageing me, outsource your maturity. Learning so fast my responsibility to your gravity. Growing up in that torsion; the twisting, tidal embrace of your unsafety.
I remember the nightmares.
Vivid, loud, swollen with monsters and needled through with the fangs of smiling adults, free of concern, grinning contented as porcelain masks flew from the walls to rattle my spine and pin me screaming to the floor. I remember.
All my useless grinning ones, offering critiques of my gracelessness while samesmiled ventriloquist dolls gnawed at my small limbs with their snapping painted maws. I remember. The trees bear no fruit to sate. The oubliette won't banish. The labyrinth won't contain.
I resonated louder and louder, a clarity of form and purpose fostered in the gnarled limbs of my cursed arboretum.
Such a skinny kid to feed your terror. A diet of fungus and bone and blinking eyes in the dark. Scraping, dragging, long-limbed things. Hooked hands reaching from every corner of my home to take me. It grouted my walls. I learned young to fear rest.
I learned young to fear rest. One day woke to adolescence, fighting the world without you. Quieter times with you gone. Bittersweet apathies leaving or returning. Struggling into adulthood, raised to love, and to fight you. I remember.
Pulling your screaming, shirtless body off of your scared lovers' cars as they drove away, taught by their own traumas to return. To set condition aside for love.
I remember the ways I was taught to set condition aside for love.
