Under My Fingernails
2022-05-25

***

One can't raise a caricature of a human being
and then draw that same self livid
when everything their child sees
is out of proportion.

Turn again the ragged page,
but cover your eyes so you don't see
the crude pencil-filled sketchings
of my genus, my culled genious,
blueprints of my taxidermy,
footnotes of a contract forever ago signed:
"You promise me that you'll be mine
for as long as I can keep you alive."

A blood oath
that we both
signed
with the rivers through which flow our lives.
But I got too much under my fingernails,
double-crossed in reflex, same unleashing hell
in a moment I made the mistake of asking if all was well.
And when I noticed what I had done,
I turned back the hands of time
to when you and I
were still alive.
A memory is just a record, one that I can rewrite
in case of failure, in case hard enough I did not try.

You only know of this because this deep-
sworn vow I am unable to keep,
to keep to myself the number of rewinds.
I am testing, and you are production,
only knowing of the strand of fate accepted,
battle-tested,
deemed sacred and happy and true.
Is it comforting, I wonder, to know
there will be no futures where I hurt you?

***

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (c) Vane Vander
