Her eyes blaze with guilt,
and an outrage at being guilty.
Being caught.

I patiently wait for the crows,
who so lovingly printed their feet
on the sides of my mother’s eyes,
to swarm me.
Swallow me whole.

Even when I’m right,
I’m wrong.
But that’s just how it is with drug addicts.

I want to hate her.
I want to deny the human that is littered
across her hands and grey hairs.
I want to erase her from my DNA
and ignore her as she has done to me.

I want to personally lay the burden
of my addictions on to her shoulders,
tell her, ‘you did this to me’,
watch her knees buckle, and then
have the audacity to ask
why she has kneeled.

But I could never hurt her in that way,
so instead I choose to look her in her face,
and ask why she can so easily do this evil
to me.

As a child I would sleep
with my head on her back,
hoping that one day
I could piece her back together.
Love her enough to make her want to change.
I tried to hold her down
like the weight at the end of a balloon,
and yet she always managed to drift.

To this day she calls me ‘baby’.
Speaks in a play voice that tells me she knows she was absent
When I was small enough to look up to her.

She never would mean to hurt me,
But she fails to see the chain reaction.
By bringing drugs and a child into her life,
She made those two companions.

And in that garden,
I searched for love under every rock that I could find.
Dug through the dirt just to blow kisses at worms.
Soiled my hands,
Searching for stability.
For something.
Anything to hold on to no matter how small.

And everything was always so small.