Scars: a poem

I sit down to write a poem.

It mustn't be a poem about love,
a true poet takes the
love he has and finds it in a
garbageman, takes
the passion he feels
and writes about a girls first
period, makes love to the
storm after the ocean and never
has the time to take a
second glance back as his jeep
pushes on towards the
horizon.

Me,
I like to think of the scar on
my right hand. The one I got
back at the Kern when we were
kids and love came to us
in the form of an open field
and salt rivers. The way the stinging
saline in our eyes echoed the pulsations
of our hearts. How the
butterflies we chased in that field,
shamelessly coveting the tandem dance
of their limitless wings only served to
shed light on our
transformation in that
solitary cocoon. I think of that.

I've learned you can't
speak in specifics. Everyone
has their own color,
own shape,
own smell
that takes them back to the day grandma
baked you a whole bunch of cookies because
you scraped your left knee.
The taste lingers in my mouth
even still as I use this inner oven
pumping blood to remind myself
scars have a way of being healed
with the sweetest medication.

And I'm no doctor,
but if I take all the times
I heard the woman downstairs cry out for him to stop,
or the nights he threw
empty beer bottles at the ground
hoping to cut through to some of the emotion
he prays is still there through the numbness
--it still cant fix the way
your eyes do on me, every time
you hold my hand and

say