kings

My mother told me you were wanted-
but from her diaries I read of a silver Honda,
its rolling into a ditch, its tin foil crumpling;
her little accident that happened when I was still in her womb.

They took her to the hospital after and searched for a heartbeat,

My heartbeat.         They couldn’t find it.        And then they did.

I like to imagine the absence my mother must have felt in the

e m p t y   s  p  a  c  e

between her arms and her chest

for the brief moments she thought I was never going to be in it.

I wonder if she ever learned to miss that feeling.

She never tried to tire her pulse again after the incident,
kept herself safe long enough to give birth to me,
to watch me grow up, but also to witness 
the same dark thoughts grow into my head.
I didn't want to replicate her but inheritance was unsought
and my line of lineage is of one trying to end its own.
I got a head start on dying before I even came into the world;
that little bundle of light

bundling rope for a necklace,

carving indexes of incongruence

on tainted canvas.

I wonder how disappointed she must be to see me like this.

This body feels less and less like the house I grew up in.

These thoughts in my head intrusive,

I try to retract them under the places it dug itselves into,

but sadness clung onto my skin.

These bittersweet memories become nestled

under cracks and spaces unseen.

All the hurt and pain I have harboured seem to have evaporated,

and now I’m left with these mismatched pieces that don’t quite fit right anymore.

Seams stitched tightly, 

unforgivingness to come undone,

but muscle memory still in overdrive.

I only ever drove on highways late night.

Street lights illuminate roads as the moon does the sky,

blinding headlights of every car I overtake in the rearview mirror.

I rest my eyes and lift my hands off the steering wheel until I felt like I was       flying

The pounding of my heart against my ribcage

so hard it felt like it was about to break.

I ask for this car to swerve senselessly and catapult

me into some uncertain dark.

Unbirthed, unharmed, unseen, undone.

I wonder if she felt the same on the night she almost took me with her.