Unkeyed
An ode to running away, in progress
Unkeyed
I.
Leap, banshee child. A camp bunk bed is ne’er too high
for ballerina legs. Run. You are quick enough
on two girl feet to flee—a tawny gilt of croft awaits,
whence wild wheat looms, and fetal knees meet throat,
their curl conceals your shock of dry-tilled tears.
Rest then, tight as two bit lips. An un-dared stir.
The air tastes sweeter here. Your sinking, sweltered star
is soon to offer you her cooler cloth, her sundown’s choir
of charring wails: You must go back, dear heart.
A sheaving plow is not a hearth
for sacred, shame-marked scars.
Look: you have a visitor: mother twilit orb spider,
who spindle-weaves your held-in heaves, for free.
Thistle-drowned, her womb web’s out-of-body sorrows
cannot bear such heavy emptiness.
Let her twitch-legs preen you viscid threads,
for’more fettered to your finger. Pointing
toward the void—as if you were then too,
its threshold. As porchlights please the moonlight,
and cirrus shimmers, indifferent.
As evening cleaves to gauzy sleeves.
O, is that a portal in the gossamer? Where am I?
And have I been here for an hour? To all that has been riven,
I surrender. Pray: Forgetting won’t remember here.
Listen: a slow search party amasses at the pasture’s periphery.
Cat calls and crackling twigs whence clumsy girls
stopped watching where they’re walking.
Where disused flashlights dimmed to leave numinous creatures
blinded, and you had rather gouged your eyes and died
chagrined, than still be of the living.
And that they mouthed your name aloud,
as if it mattered you were found, as if the worst of them,
who read your unkeyed diary, who jeered its braved and maiden
entry, who coaxed the other coattailed imps to giggle.
As if they hadn’t preyed to fillet the prave fibers
from the fierce husk of a girl’s first-shucked hysteria.
II.
For to that ladder she’d descend, its last rung stung
and struck her step, her plunge complicit, only bore
the blunted ache of weight when bribed, regret—
the stake to hasten every hell that would thenceforth
exact its pull, as thresholds scoffed and mocked the split,
the gorge between the wench before her fall and after it,
once breached, its blanching, blackened drift expands,
the pickled pit consumed the peach, the spoil did eat itself,
the spool spent bared, its thread, a noose unloosed,
a maw of corridor, blindly clutched, her unheard pleas—
please let me out—the shame her plaintive overwhelms
would not permit, the exit locked, its flashing sign,
her wretched choice—the boy she weary, birthed to life,
to steady, though his bleak and needful mind, less apt.
The scourge of having failed her own—collapsed.
O centrifugal seed—that she grew need, such darker vials,
those feral sips, her conscience lost, her eyes aghast,
those brittle nights of mirrors broken, and then asked:
What is it I see in you? What ghoul, what stranglehold,
what crimson fruit, what nightshade shall I pluck?—
cried one more stem uncleanly cut. Serrated was her glut
of guilt, where Mercy hew itself: There is nothing owed to her
but death. Would she be worth that recompense?
—Hillary Frasier Hays
For those of you not entirely opposed to emerging technologies, or opposed to them for this particular purpose, the avatar you see here is based on a recent photo of me. She recites my poem better than I can. I’ve tried to record video of myself but I just can’t bear to. This rendering only features part I of Unkeyed. I’ll make a new one soon.