BRINGING HOME THE STRAYS
5. He Is A Survival Expert
he enters it with his big brown eyes, he's softly spoken, so careful like a dog at the pound, how he must have used those sorrowful eyes on all those women in the past, he is so needy, i'm not as strong as i first thought, i run the risk of going under, they own nothing, these stray men, so that all their energy is put into surviving, they may be rough & not well presented but they are usually articulate, experts at the game of being taken in & looked after, they are little beacons of desperation & power, i am their injured angel, their mail order bride, always bringing home the strays, but i end up alone, after having left them, heartbroken for the world, that they return back to & they always go back, still smashed up & i always let them go, remaining behind, heart-broken & crying, it's not just a one way thing, they are experts at getting me to look after them, as a child i looked after anything that came my way, as a child would, i picked up broken snails & wrapped them in leaves to bubble up, i washed the strays dogs & combed out their knotty hair & put the baby birds back into their nests, praying for their parents to return to feed them, their twisted legs & gangly wings smashed from the fall, i wished they would grow into birds or flight, even when i knew there was no hope, i hung around the base of trees & hung on, i spent my time wishing, i carried my dysfunctional parents on my back, as a child does, carrying objects one hundred times its weight, like an ant, a dying child will carry a whole family to safety whilst it's being crushed, if it thinks it has to in order to survive, in this way a dying child crumbles beneath the weight of codependence, in this way a dying child turns into an odd adult, crumpled beneath the weight of what it carries, like you walk into a room in a queer house & think, i can't place my finger on it, it's not quite right, i must learn to interpret the signs, know what i can take on & what i can't, like him i must learn to be a survival expert, to enter the garbage bins of my life, with my senses alert |