Grotesque Head

Tonight, I drove into the sky towards work, like a jet, white thoughts streaming behind me. Last week, there was a "disclosure" with one of the boys that lives at the home. After being here - being "safe" for four years, he finally confessed to the staff of the abuse he suffered through as a little boy. Your imagination cannot take you to the places he lived through. The week before that, I was sick for days after learning the history of two brothers that have just come to stay with us.
I don't know how to carry such ugliness.

Tonight, the sun keeps on setting, all gold and pink, and I can smell cool, wet fields of wheat and ditches of clover. I will sit in the chair by the window and read from a book that makes my breath come quick with the beauty of it, sip tea, curl into an "s" under a blanket, thank God.
I don't know how to hold such joy.

I am da Vinci's grotesque head: peeled skin, exposed muscle. Beauty and pain are both salt on blood-wet flesh. I am a traveler, (because we are all travelers) and I can hardly stand for the beauty on my back, or move for the mud on my boots. "X" marks the spot, and I am here, at the junction where sin meets love, wondering at the sting from the tears. I am looking around in wide-eyed amazement, murmuring lips, eyes squinting, checking the map.