Letters from you to me
The letters come to me
Unedited sporadic
Mail of pain and redemption
Of lost hope
Of being lost
Attempts to find
The layers I pick through for words that define
The condition of your days
Bruises and cuts
Time from booze
And blood
Seeping down your arm
Onto the floor
As you dig ever deeper
To uncover the horror
Of your early life
And the intrinsic meaning
Of the battering and beatings
That have left you forever
Detached from life
Or the prospect of love
But attached instead to a loathing of self
Your sense of depletion
And your constant deception
The endless
Hiding and seeking
Lost hours making up lost days
Meeting years that make a life that’s lasted longer that you expected
You, constantly projecting
That you’ll be gone when you are done
When you have cut the wound from your body
From your mind
You’ll have somehow won
When you have scalpeled the words onto the page
And only then
The rage
That normally persists will hopefully desist
There is undiscovered
Loss and hope for a different time
When your skin on mine
Was warm or hot
Not covered in marks from the harm you inflict
But now, today, we wait
Is this the first or last
The pain of loss
Meets the list of gains
The horrors revealed but always contained
The things that were done
To your small body
Can never be separated from the man
You then had to become.