They might as well have taken the floorboards too. The year was 1997, the year the gestappo wolves barged in, flashing badges wih a double S for Social Services. They took our home and dismantled it as if it were merely procedure. We are not procedure. 

We, the forgotten youth of those who couldn’t save us from being swept beneath the rug of blind justice 3-5 years after she turned a deaf ear, children are not meant to be shuffled like cards, traveling from deck to deck, foster home to foster home, until they find someone who will window shop for their future like they actually have that right, I apologize, but I have a mother, who worked 3 jobs just to make sure our bellies were full.

Instead, the roots of my family tree were hacked in two, growing into divergent branches I either  couldn’t find my smile in, or didn’t recognize. When asked in school to fill out a genealogy, I was ‘that kid’ who knew nothing of how his bones were grown, but I knew they were not filled out and filed from official paperwork bloodline that means nothing when you realize that the family reunions don’t really include you. 

So I forfeited my secondhand skin and traded it for a past that no one would stare at me for. 

I sometimes wish my first Halloween that I remember hadn’t been partitioned with a bulletproof pane of glass between the two of us, but it was ok, I was Superman that day, nothing could stop me. Not the paperwork half truths and testimonies of the demons cooking up trouble by the pharmaceuticals they’re supposed to be selling, or how our fingers were ripped apart like an unwanted zipper, no… I was Superman. 

But when the cape came off and the sugar rush went away, I remembered that being under that rug was uncomfortable, it got really dark in there, and you got stepped on more than your unknown bones could hold sometimes, but you know I was too young to realize it would be almost half of one of Christ’s lifetimes before I saw her again, and I wish I could take those nails that built her thorny cage and turn them into a chair, you know you work so hard Mom, you should rest those feet, and now you can.
I’m home.