For Fear of Returning Home

I curl my hands up into little *****,
small concentrations of the frustration I'm boiling in.

I fold in on myself like a sheet of paper
I crumple and wrinkle
and I haven't spoken to you in a while, now.

I am a sad excuse
for a great many things.
But he loves me anyway:
saying those things are just things,
just that,

even if I have been through
"more than most people should."

And he still tries to talk to me
He still feels the need to tell me
things I would be better off not knowing.

"I liked cuddling with you,"
he tells me.
I collapse in on myself and forget how to exist.

We are traveling at 70 down I-55
tire treads and wooden crosses forgotten on the shoulder
and I think of the monks in Vietnam who
walk two thousand miles around a lake
falling prostrate at every third step.

And I think of how much easier that would be
than to pray at the side of the interstate
falling prostrate every third step
onto broken glass and all that litters
and glitters in the headlights--
and catches your tires as you slip into the shoulder

late at night when the moon is new and absent
and you are tired.

I think of how much easier it would be
falling prostrate every third step
down the fifty miles to my bed

than to promise myself that I will
wake up tomorrow at all.

I slept all day today, my love
and I know you are disappointed--

but sometimes, most times,
it doesn't really seem worth the effort.
I wonder what motivates a seedling to keep striving
for the surface at the promise of sunlight
after spending so long in the dark.

Is the sun even shining, my love?
Can you promise me that one thing,
that pushing through whatever
hell this is

that there will be sunlight when I break through?

I don't want to tell you--
your love scars the side of my leg worse than
his **** ever did--

but he haunts me worse than
anything before him

and I am afraid of going back home to look at
the God-fearing family that sleeps
ignorant.