Many days ahead still
to break down a body takes time
to break down an image built up
so long, so many fucking years,
a plan, a pattern, a steel will and
hard head, soft with romance,
adventure and fury, a stubbornness
fiercer than a mother’s,
she who endured the beating
neglect of everyone who ever
claimed to love her and never stopped
gaining on them all, earning by degrees
and respect, even if she came late
to loving herself.
Many lessons to learn
how the humbling of a human
being slow-stodgily sinks in,
brick by brick pitched at a head,
to break in the wall of a notion
make it understood that
leading life in a spin
loses the ability to take notes,
to catch up, remember it all
the test failed, no doubt.
for it cannot be otherwise
in learning how to be someone else,
a someone else, and merge her
to the pre-existing other.
Impossible to grow two people
as one dies to feed the other,
but to kill a person is not easy,
interminably terminally long,
unlike the beginning,
life bursting on the scene in violence,
painfully spasmodic spilling
into the suffocating air,
and bleeding out
in infinite incremental specks
unseen, unheard, unrealized
only now and again spying her
a twin, creeping along the fence
in the yard peering out cracks.
In the gaze of the other 