Pencil

You are pencil
Simple as wood covering
Cradling
The bark has be lead
To hollow
Led filled center
You enter page,
as though you were dancing on it
As though you know the stains you make
Will one day shape letters
And we will know to read you
Sharpened and chiseled edges
Left softer from time
Softer from poems
That have escaped
The fine point
You call front and center.
We do not live in subtext.
The back end of you
Holds no eraser
No need…
But is full, Intact,
Bursting with memories.
Hesitance makes up your vocabulary
Yet you are not the gummy pink of perhaps
- You are not about to erase the mistakes you made
Because you know, to us,
they are full of holy words
Made all the more sacred
by the density of the honest
Of the absurd in too perfect
Of the backwards
to heavy and break cord
we fail to recognize
In our own lives.
You are ready to tell us,
“this is where I’ve been”
...
I grow shorter and more delicate with time
Time does not sharpen me
Does not permit these edges
to turn back towards rough
Chiseled
Is the beginning
Chiseled is the weight
of not knowing
Of exploring
The options of pain
And tragedy
Those things have left led to page
And have been replaced.
I keep making my way
Up
To lighter
To smaller
to softer
…
My marks upon your pages,
Now resemble postcards
Of where I have been
Rather than novels
Telling the stories
I know you could never have seen.