Poetry Thursday on Friday

This is the third version of Sister. I've started submitting my poetry on Urbis and have gotten a lot of suggestions there that have helped me refine this poem and make it more clear. The original version is here. Any comments or critiques are welcome.


Sister

You crawled inside this empty chest
ten years ago.
You carved a hole within
like a grown-up fetus.


Vascillation sorrow
uncertainty.
I try to speak.
In that forced-closed-throat way
it’s as if my every word to you
were lies.
As if I didn’t know you.


Maybe I don’t.
Really.


I’m not crazy, sister.
You said paranoid.
Imaginations tricking me.
Sometimes I can’t see
Truly
those words of yours
for what
they really
are.
Here is the truth: I am not misconstruing you.


When you were here
in my heart,
in my love,
curled in my belly,
I couldn’t wait for you to speak.
Nearly unbearable that waiting
That looking up for your other muddy shoe to drop.
(Say what you mean. Just speak.)


I hate your silence.
Your punishment for my letting you set up shop in my head.
I loved you as a sister should.


I used to always reach for you.
As if by merely touching you,
like a bleeding woman finally feeling
the hem of Jesus’ robe under her fingers,
I would be healed.
Knowing you were really
there
calming pesky fears of mine
latent and pregnant
now budding
now flowering
a red-blood fruition
of Abandonment.


That gaping hole
bloody in my belly
you made
when you burst from me,
like an Alien in a movie,
leaves me dead-feeling.
Corpse-like.
The only remnants of me
bloody-trailing footprints
shuffling to the tune of a Thorazine drip.


I could hate you so easily.
I could be as bitter as green Persimmons.
Hard-launching words
cruel fast
from ancient catapults.
And they would cut you.
Sister.
To the bone-within-your-bone.


Does this culpa(bility)
torturous-repeat in your brain?
Its viney-creeping-crawl up your spine,
itself curly-que-ing’round
neurons,
axon terminals,
dendrites and
synaptic gaps?


Validation (of pain).
Closure (of love).
You keep from me.
Sisterlove you.
Still.



Go away.