My Girl

Like the sun

My girl says Good Morning with the opening of her eyes

And the way she purses her lips

As her limbs stretch to the sky, to embrace the coming of the day

 

She smells like girly shampoo

It overwhelms me when she lies down next to me

All I can do is breathe her in

And hope to god the indent of her body on my mattress

Never disappears

 

Her hair is soft

A ribbon running through the slits in my hands

And when I touch it I wonder

What she would look like if it were gone

 

But what about those hands?

We must talk about those hands

Merely due to the fact that they are slight

They are kind

They have never broken another’s soul

Or greedily reached in to another’s chest

And stolen the red, beating apple of life

 

They are young

They are the hands of a fetus

Who has only known the touch of its mother’s love

 

She is a mother

I ponder the images in her daughters head

When she wakes up to the soft coo

And the warm cradle of her arms and her breasts

 

I cannot help but envy the child

The purely innocent love stored between them

Is a kind of love

That I have been dying to comprehend

My entire life

 

 

But I am the equivalent of a ghost to her

She sees into me

She sees through me

I wonder what she notices

 

Does she recognize the tiny black lines that run down the middle of my heart

Pulling the two halves back together as one?

Can she identify the bandages on my bones

From where others have grabbed them like twigs

From trees who were baby branches that never grew

And snapped them right in half?

 

Does she see my soul

It’s blackened hands reaching out from behind the cages of my ribs

Begging for freedom

From the lifetime of solitude it has endured?

 

My girl

I have found her

Or maybe, she has found me

Stumbled upon a daisy

Living in a world without sunlight

 

Taking my swollen eyes in her hands

She kissed my lids, the redness of her mouth engulfing my very being

Those youthful hands working meticulously, day by day

To stitch up each dented piece of my heart

Those fingers,

Smoothing each bandage on my broken and bleeding bones

 

My girl

My savior

 

Like the sunset

Her head falls on my chest as if it is the sun

Falling behind the mountains after a day full

Of explosions and colors

 

And as the day turns to dusk

And the dusk prepares for dawn

I will wait to wake up

And dream her all over again

 

My love