:: Mad minstrels ::

Sometimes I toss and dream and in my dreams, I am a mother. One that never was, one that always will be, with or without you. My heart and my body remember the child that was taken, and my mind calls on the blighting blisters of another's poem: I'm seven now as I was then; when children die they do not grow.

You would have been, wouldn't you. You would have been seven. You would have been growing, glowing, a bright-eyed existence, clear as day, and stronger than memories. You would have been loved, even if you were unwanted; you would have been cherished, even if you were an accident. You would have been named, even if you were born outside of a licit definition. You would have been.

I am tearless when I think of you, about you―my teenage casualty, the clumsy result of my pedomorphic passion. I'm tearless, but then my regret becomes lonely swirls of ivory fire, white-hot and bitter. It's a claw, you see, a claw cleaving at my conscience, like nails in my veins: you would have been, but you couldn't, and you didn't, and all of this―now―has become a dissolvent of dreams. I'm corroded by your possibility. If I were braver, if I had been more of a mother than a martyr, then―who's to say? I could be craddling you now, instead of an overwrought penance. You would be safe, and I would have been saved―no scar tissue―not in mind, not in my heart, and not in my womb.

We sought an inchoate exit for you, you see, and now I bear the guilt of not having borne you. You are a shadow in my smile, and with or without you, I will always be a mother, even if all I'm carrying now is a surrogate dream left to dry in the playground of an elapsed era.

***

I'm high on corporate cannabis at the moment. Excuse my silence. Shalom, everyone, even if peace is a lethe utopia, an accomplice to the dissident void of nothingness.