With me.

Things keep bouncing back
Keep coming up
Things I thought I had forgotten
Thought I had closed the door on
Buried that hatchet
And the last of the horse-bones
With it.
Keeps cropping up.
Head rearing, wing-flapping
Dragons with their claws and teeth
That baby with her cold eyes
The smell of injustice
A maggot or two.
The moments that counted
When I was helpless to do anything but stand quietly by.
When there was no doing in the world,
No saying, no paying, no going or coming
No killing that could save.
It's those moments I die still in every day.
That I could take your place,
Your pain,
Your rabid desperation
Oh god, that anything I could do would help
But I am dwarfed, made mute and impotent by my fear
My naïveté.
My shocking weakness.

I know it isn't my fault, and little anyone could do
But still I didn't measure up
And it's my own disappointment that haunts me
That finds its way into my skin
Only to be cut out again.
Oh god, poor me.
Misguided martyr,
Tortured soul can I ever let go the idea that
Any of it.
Anything at all.
Has anything.

To do.

With me.