seed

I wonder if she ever thinks
of him when she looks at
me: The rampant weed of some
scattered seeds sprouting up in unexpected
places now. The gift of a fit of
assaulted caution - we don’t speak of it.
I wonder if she loved him, even for any moment,
or if they talked about who their
child together would be, holding tight
like orphans, testing that one more second
would be for squeezing the very last drop
out of the only thing that could not run dry.
They were looking in the right places
for the wrong things. But it’s
growing now behind the words that
straddled some stranger’s confession, beneath
the blanket of every fairy-taled child sleeping
with the enemy of their soil’s soiled stem.
There’s no room to be welcomed by those who keep
spitting into the sand that falls through
the fist of every half-born son and calling it their own,
those inadvertent pacifiers who need sex most
and are the least like parents.
It’s living between the fantasy that keeps them
together in the mind of the same old placebo and
the moment when they wake up,
still barely turning their wet backs away
from a vanishing nightmare and screaming:
we can’t own life, You can’t ever own life.