Ponderings, which themselves are trying to be a Poem.

Sometimes I wonder.

There are many things I don’t understand

but I think the greatest bafflement of all is

that which I am made of.

I don’t mean atoms

(although I still have yet to see one),

but the stuff that makes me…

…what?

Me?

Tick.

Exist.

I pride myself on

reading people;

twitchy hands,

folded arms,

kind eyes,

they all speak mountains about the

people

who possess them.

Sometimes I just

watch people

and imagine their lives…

Her daughter’s schoolwork brings out the grey around her temples.

His father disappears at night and comes home not-quietly-enough to maintain his secrets.

This one gets in fights. See the yellowed bruises and the scars around his knuckles.

These two aren’t as in love as she thinks they are.

But I can’t figure out that greatest mystery of all.

Myself.

Sometimes it seems like

certain people

see right through me.

They make some statement about my inner character that

is obvious

to them.

And I act like I’m well aware

and then I go home

and stare at myself in the mirror

and wonder,

“What’s behind those eyes?”

Blue eyes,

bluer some days than others.

People tell me I have my grandfather’s eyes.

I have nobody’s eyes.

I have nobody’s

atoms.

Does someone really exist if you’ve never

seen their face?

touched their skin?

heard their voice?

Or is she,

that elusive woman I might have called

“mother,”

just a

hypothetical

person?

With hypothetical

children

who she hypothetically

didn’t give away.

When I cried at night

as a child

and begged the darkness for my mommy,

why didn’t I

walk across the hall to her room?

Why did I

never quite fit

inside her arms?

She loves me,

I know,

but why didn’t

SHE?

The other.

The hypothetical.

I don’t begrudge her decision

to give me a better life than

“that kid with a teenaged mom,”

but why

the seperation

the firm

sharp

cleaving of ties?

Is it true that babies

in the womb

can feel how their mom

doesn’t want them?

Is that why I need,

so badly,

to be loved?

to be accepted?

Like I never was.

Or was it that she did love me

but had to say goodbye

and I felt her presence go

but didn’t understand?

Is that what I feel

when I can’t seem to patch up

that little hole on my heart?

Maybe I’ll never know.

Or maybe I’ll find her.

Maybe she’s beautiful now,

a grown woman, ready for the world,

with a life, a family.

A family that’s

not mine but somehow also

slightly

me.

Sometimes I wonder.

Late at night

I lie awake

and I listen to the house,

the house I grew up in,

the one my loving parents raised me and my brother in,

as it settles down for a cold winter night.

Sometimes I pull my blankets up

over my nose,

because it’s cold,

and I feel the weight

of abandonment?

of disillusion?

of displacement?

of heavy woolen blankets.

Sometimes I wonder.