6.

I was eight years old
with a new father, living in a new land

a harsh new land full of faults, its rocky crust
fractured high and low, with no outlet to the sea

It was a man's world where life and death
could not be hidden like the scars of earlier life

scars covered with makeup,
scars that stretched all the way back

to Brother Floyd, a man more Yahweh than Christ, blood of my blood,
who rattled our world from the epicenter of God's House

whose every word echoed like a canon
with Thou Shalt Not written in stone

a man whose best lessons were taught with the back
of his hand until we were saved by a man self-confessedly Godless

I hadn't really noticed, mother, what was growing inside you
as in the quiet of my room I turned a flashlight to my own warped      space

praying each night I would not become my father
that nowhere in me would the slow accretion of hurt

and rage accumulate like calcium carbonate
forming in the recesses of Lehman Caves, stalactites and stalagmites

festering quietly in the darkness there, strange formations
of drip and flow that could one day cripple me

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