Honest
I imagine you, alone in my house
For a day, without binding you to a promise
Not to search through angles and nooks, and
Other concrete memories filed away in haphazard places.
I imagine coming home to you
A pile of my past on the kitchen table
As you hold up each item and wordlessly
Ask me for a more explained honesty.
You ask of letters old and grey
Bound with a soft cord and a gentle knot.
You ask of pictures of me with her
And others implied by time and space.
You ask of official documents of a younger man,
Those things held for required years and more
In powered fear and presence--
Those years that ground the wild from me.
You stop me, you hold me
Comforted that all I am is now in you.
We read in quiet and look up at times
To bind with sight the closeness.
And as I fall asleep at night,
With your head on my chest and an arm around you,
I think of that kitchen table and recall the other
Unremembered thing from the dimness of my shadow.
In the darkness of a corner behind the basement stairs,
Crouches a pale and toothless unlit face
Seen only by an indirect gaze off the shine of a window
A bastard of a lonely thing sits, waiting for the dawn to come.
You have taken from me all my honesty,
And nothing of worth from the rest of me…
Mike Brady
December 2004/2008/2010
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