Fissured Girl

My friends don’t know

how much I love horses,

how I went to a rodeo,

laughed the whole time about

being there,

but

left and thought,

if I had been born in the West,

I would have given all my time

to thrill and connection

to manure and dust.

My mother doesn’t know

how when the world is

all hurricanes,

all tornadoes,

plugged in blow dryers in a library,

I retreat to an illusion of hilltop,

ankles itched by yellow weeds,

spinning

running

diving into a snickering stream.

I don’t know

much

really

about this world.

I know it’s cracked,

a fissured rock with a swimming pool of souls.

I know it’s dying, melting, rotting away.

Oh

but,

I do know it’s grand too—

a love song

a masterful oil painting

a wooing poem about magnificence and color.

And I know me,

I know I am most rested

when I am free.

I know clipping my toenails

at regular human intervals

is a rare victory.

I know what unzips

every steel layer

and piece of chainmail

faster than I can breath

and punctures my heart with a needle.

And I know, this identity of mine

though fissured, and chipped

does not melt, or rot away.

It is the low bass line,

the fervent blue,

the rhyming beat.