MAUDLIN MAWS▪︎Poetry (3)

56. Motherly Elegy

She rattles_ black aching oak tree and something hums within me
A thoroughbred tear I wasn't spared the tick of its first pare
She pulsates and sings like a wretched petal to climb on my back,
_the very thing she wasn't been given when she was a bairn.
And I cling to stall the momentum of her preying on every peeble of reliance I once felt towards her;
Once when I, a child had mistaken her rot for woven tenderness
As she spoke of my decades in depiction of what has been stolen from her notecase;
an ambitious stupor with sleek greatnesss for sight
It carried no vows for my daddy or a womb to retch me;
a due clandestine orphan, the chosen crook of her own compensating colon

And I may be lopping decent speech from the indexed emblems that make the tinge in my chest speak
But I'm still jittery and strewed with her frown and wince-stamped, dilatant rebukes
The censures fall down on me, a scourge calling me on my amiss culpability
'You', says her judgement; the fingernail the color of indignation and ferine demotion
'You', her voice imparting the things that smelled like mouldering eggshells in the custody of my breast
'You', reminding me of what makes a daughter be
Things I failed to bond and bridle
Streams of what hubs my recesses I missed to bring the fresh waters of at the chalked brine of her seas

Me the louse, the hound, the wound
Gnawing at the transpired tragedy of fitting into my mother's face;
Working-in her insults through the bridgework of my craw kiss
Unfeeling the way her wooden ladel scrapes the bottom of the broth's pot,
Cubed carrots, celery stalks, bay leaves
She serves at the rectangle board, to us, to his plate in full matrimonial pests.
Her meagerness maintain my affairs;
A glove for when I was too young to fit it in anymore...here I am coercing my hand into an extremity of blood;
an endowment of her arsenic ways
Half waiting, half withholding the sweltering plot in my midriff
Tending the sink with red coagulating footsteps of my anguish,
The pulse heavy-phlegm toiling at keeping count on just three lines each night
(Toeing the mark a snubbed promise at times)
Recognising myself something other than rubber arms and trimming fingers
Is a thought too tiring
So I stare at her; the woman she graved to be
Comiting the sin in lending her my credence in believing a daughter can be enough to merit a mother's protection for free
See me serve my sentence bidding on her scant tolerance
Let me try again just this once
I promise I'll be worth your love
I'll be her...mom_swear it on the life you never wished to give me

14/8/2023