Hard

 

Rising at dawn,

with my emotional skin

intact, and you

not there, my heart

still beating,

which surprises the hell

out of me,

knowing I must face a new

day alone,

feeling my guts roil

at the hardening thought.

 

Remembering the

viper attack of your

tongue, with cruelty  as your

fangs and laughter

your venom, each

strike infecting my soul

and each time

wondering why your barbed

words are aimed so low, is

hard.

 

Baby, no one of two is

ever guiltless,

and I know there were mistakes,

errs in judgement,

slights of tongue all

around, but I don’t

play the memory game,

no slice and dice comes

from my mouth,

which makes this

harder.

 

So …, I throw

in the towel, let

you walk, and now

I feel the pain from

our corpse lined with chalk,

the extraction from my

chest (no longer

my heart) just a gaping hole

where once a man lived,

and that is

hard,

hard pain is

hard gain,

hard gain can

make a soul

refrain … from life,

and time is

the eternal curse,

and that cuts

hard.

 

But I know that

given time this hole

in my middle will heal,

form a scab

that I will pick at from

time to time.

What I worry about now

is how thick will

the scar tissue be

this time?

Harder.

 

I know, I know,

we beat ourselves up

in the cruelest of ways,

and what people say in anger

will at times feel

like truth, sound like truth,

have the raw edge of

sandpaper on emotion

and we leech pointillist droplets

of blood from our soul.

You have done me a favour,

for now I’ve learned who

and what I am, and

soon I will be human again,

and maybe next

time it won’t be so

hard.

 

Glenn D. Clarke

28/06/09