inheritance

I have spent too much of my life swallowing other people like bad medicine.

my mother made one decision.

one. very final. very efficient. it must have made sense to her.

for her it only had to make sense one time. for me it was something to make sense of every day since.

my father did it the other way.

nothing quick. nothing anybody could point to and call the moment.

just a couple thousand small decisions spread across a whole life.

the boring kind.

another year of not saving. not planning. not building one goddamn thing beneath himself.

until there was nothing holding him up

then gravity did what gravity does and he fell… all the way down into the basement. not in the poem. in my house.

of course he did.

where the hell else were all those choices going to go?

apparently everyone’s consequences, each and every one, have been given my address.

nobody tells you this part.

other people’s bad decisions do not stay with other people.

they pack a bag.

they move in.

they use your toothpaste.

she killed herself once. yet it kills me every godforsaken day.

he spent his life not preparing for his life. now his life is a room inside mine.

and somewhere in the middle of all this,

you,

whose own life is a series of bricks you decided to throw straight up into the air instead of building anything with them,

suddenly call yourself a structural engineer,

standing there with a dented skull, telling me how my life is not built to code.

go on then.

tell me what a healthy person does.

go find one and ask them.

tell me about discipline with your mouth still full of the shit you voluntarily ate as if you even know how to spell the word.

you had choices.

you used them badly, but you had them.

you do not know what a luxury a bad choice is.

you do not know what it is to wake up every morning inside somebody else’s.

and no, I do not hate you because you wrecked yourself.

wreck yourself.

ruin away.

I have never needed anybody to be good at being alive.

I have sat beside plenty agents of chaos, ticking time bombs, arsonists, loose cannons & live wires, bought them a beer clapped a hand on their backs and asked ‘why’ before I asked ‘what the fuck is wrong with you’

why did you lie?

why did you lash out?

why did you disappear?

what happened?

what were you trying not to feel?

I will walk anybody’s bad habit all the way home

and shake hands with whatever raised it.

I can hand you your own reasons back in better words than you gave them to me.

even while they are hurting me.

not later. while.

I have had the animal on top of me with its teeth through my arm, its gums against my skin, blood running down to my elbow,

and there I am with my other hand digging through its filthy fur

looking for the scar, the burn, the place somebody kicked it,

‘easy.’

‘easy now.’

‘who hurt you?’

‘who starved you?’

it is eating me alive while i am trying to find anything,

anything besides

this thing is eating me because it is a thing that fucking eats me.

stupid, probably.

the ruptured artery does not care how well I understand what mortally wounded me.

but I still ask. I always ask.

then I do one ugly thing.

one thing to get through a night you did not have to live.

one thing to keep my legs underneath me.

and nobody asks me shit.

they see blood in my mouth and never ask whose it is.

bad animal.

bad fucking animal!

put it down.

you do not want ‘why’

you want my jaw pried open so you can point.

look at that.

disgusting.

fine. put your finger all the way down my throat.

some of you is still in there. I cannot keep it down anymore anyway.

come closer.

so I can spit it all back in your face, vomit it all up until there is nothing left.

your collapse gets a whole biography: you were lonely. you were afraid. you were confused. you were drunk. you had a bad childhood. you were trying. you did not know better.

every messy thing you did gets a past, a reason, a frightened little heart still beating beneath it.

mine gets one word.

rabid.

I looked at your worst behavior considered the whole life behind it.

you saw mine looked right past my face and gave me a label.

when it is my turn on the exam table

everybody suddenly remembers somewhere else they have to be.

so yes.

I think less of you.

not because you ruined your life.

because you found standards the minute they could be used against me.

because your harm makes you complicated

and mine makes me unworthy.

because I sat beside you inside the crumbling ruins of your own (de)construction.

and you climbed out just long enough to condemn mine.

some of what is within me, I did not put there.

some of it came with a death certificate.

some of it sleeps downstairs and calls me by my first name.

some of it was already decided before it reached me.

and I am supposed to be ashamed because the way I am still standing is not pretty enough for you.

pretty was not one of the available options.

much of what knocked you down, you chose.

I did not. I did not make every mess in me.

I am the poor stupid bastard still here after everybody else finished making it and then fucked off.

other people swing the sledgehammer. I am issued a janitor uniform.

so go ahead.

stand there in the middle of the mangled mess you made with your own two meat hooks,

and tell me where i missed a spot as i am wiping up blood I did not spill.

could it be it has escaped your notice? you have still got some on your hands.

so maybe fuck you. for not cleaning yourself up first, before passing judgment on the job I’m doing.

now move.

I have to mop this shit up before morning.