Come on Out

There's still a little boy
inside me.
He hasn't died.
He's hiding.
He learned a long time ago
that love can fracture
and people can leave.
And sometimes the person
who says they love you
is the one with
the abscessed heart.
So he stopped trusting people.
I don't blame him.

I drank for years
because drinking made him quiet.
It didn't fix anything.
It just gave him
a dark place to hide.
I spent five years
in a relationship
that taught me
how much pain
two people can hand
to each other.
There were apologies
and promises.
There were nights
when neither one of us
knew how to stop.
And that little boy
kept watching.
He learned.

That's the dangerous part.
Children learn things
they shouldn't.
They learn what anger sounds like.
They learn when a walk
against the autumn sky
is better than sitting at home.
And sometimes they grow up
taking those lessons
into every room they enter.

I'm still trying
to teach that freckled dreamer
something different.
That not everybody
is coming to hurt him.
That he doesn't have to
keep his fist clenched tight.
That he can come out
of the dark.

We get older,
but we don't forget
what happened.
Hopefully we learn
to take less shit.