d'os

i will make a palace from your bones

a vertebra for each step

and the clavicle for your throne

© gnossienne

the narrator's lament.

the first time you crack my spine, you will be too young for me. lent and spent, dogeared, i will weather your sticky-fingered touch with the bad grace of library books everywhere, handled without care for years without end and plastic-coated, built to withstand the worst of humanity. you will throw me in your backpack and the next time i see the light of day will be at a double-header baseball game, patchwork men yelling peanuts in the distance and your brothers shouting for home. you will hide me in the folds of your oversized sweatshirt and callously drip mustard from your corn dog onto my twelfth page, and i will feel it smear and stick against my thirteenth and hate you, hate you, hate you. i will twist my language to obscurities that your youthful eyes will find obscene; i will press my letters together until you are forced to squint against the sinking sun; i will slice open the pad of your index finger once, twice, and nevermind the blood. 

you will return me, abandon me, forget me. i will have known you would. 

when you find me again, adulthood will not yet be yours, but you will be a far cry from childhood; you will tuck me carefully beneath your arm and walk me through the library doors yourself. when you crack my spine, you will let one bitten nail drag lightly down my pages, and your touch will be soft enough that i will forgive you the child you once were. you will be the first person in half a decade to take the time to unstick my twelfth and thirteenth pages, and when you see the caked, yellowed stain there you will laugh, wondering, as though you know it was you that left it. as though you remember me. i will open for you, this time, as i refused when we first met, showing you all that i can bear to this early—you are young yet, untrusted, and i will not reveal to you nuances scholars have missed. still, it will be enough, and you will keep me hidden under your duvet until well into the night, a flashlight caught between your cheek and shoulder so you can see every inch of me, even in darkness. 

lent and spent a thousand times over, and no reader will ever have seen me as you shall. 

Read More

Richard Siken’s The Long and Short of It.

Read here.

from You Are Jeff by Richard Siken.