Curiosity Killed the Childhood

I. As children, we unfolded questions from our book bags.

Questions like, “How does the sun shine?” and “Why does the sky stay blue, even so deep at night, and we can’t see?”

While parents who never learned these things provide sweat-dripped white lie responses. They never showed us the honesty in not knowing. How humility feels when done right, or how to be a child.

These little life lessons we missed out on, these never heal.

II. We stole religious icons, like street signs, and terrified the meanings out of them.

We rewrote religious dogma, and then we shenanigan’d, we shenanigan’d everybody to tears.

So we tattooed crosses to the bottoms of our feet, because we believe God lives in the raindrops, and when the clouds of our eyes swell with condensation, we will walk on top of God with feet Holy enough to bare his son. Or at least his icon. An icon that can be kicked on it’s side, axis shift stumbling towards the spot; he marks it. He’s my crosshair with preset sights, and you are clearly there at the end of the road.

III. You are there, like a broadway, broad-chest’d, backbone barreling gasp for air.

Jamming needles full of Novocain into spinal chords and those small spaces behind your molars. We’ll jettison ourselves out of vacuum-sealed syringes and backflip down your windpipe, numbing you down to the beds of your toenails.

Where beds of needles and beds of hay are no longer concerned, we’ll play sweet soft sheets of pillow talk, back and forth. We’ll listen to the sound of the bitten lip popping back into place. We’ll hear the sound of sleepyhead fingers sliding through the empty doorways below sleepyhead knuckles.

And when we find each other, tangled in tattoos. In a scene where our defining lines combined into one, we will still remember that the ground we walk on is composed of the raindrops from our clouded eyes, and that these rain-drip dropping tears are composed of God, and that our cross footed feet are holy enough to walk on.

We will not falter in showing you this.

We will hold the tethers of our appendages tightly pressed together, and we will float in the majesty of not knowing all the answers.

IV. Let this play:

•Don’t forget to lose your head,

•Make something sweet and snort it,

•Treat your ears to something long-lasting,

•While your eyes shut tightly for dreaming,

•Let your mouth retreat to your stomach so that you must get the wind knocked out of you before you can ever try and find your voice,

•Have your skin thicken into tufts of cement, while allowing your psyche to remain an ever-growing pit of quicksand.

Let yourself get lost on purpose,

So that when the skeletons return from underneath the mattresses whose bedposts are full of notches, they have to bet on their own bones for luck in finding you.

Get lost on purpose, so when we grab ahold of you, you know you were never alone from the get-go.