Scrampled Eggs

Children have open hearts, pouring out onto the carpet, onto the street signs telling them to stop, all over the sensibilities of mom and dad blurring out the boundaries of their love

“Open your heart to the world.”

Let it love you severely

We see it hanging around your neck tied together with some bird feathers and twine

Your hair down, crisscrossing the intersection of where you scrapped your knee when you were seven, or maybe nine or even eleven

And you have to remind yourself when you wake up in the morning, swing your feet over the bed and look at your knee:

I’m not seven anymore.

But when your chest holds its pain like an oath, how do you break it open softly, gently? See its seeds and juice spilling down your hands, and not feel like you’ve peeled apart your own heart?

Walking around, living like an open sore, every stare, every look, a pin poking against the flesh of an underbelly exposed - too soon.

Too soon, they’ll say

So it’s back to when you laid in fields in the summer heat, a breakfast of eggs from that weird Norwegian babysitter in your tummy, and you haven’t yet hidden that soft, velvet part of yourself from the world

Bettina was her name

We walked home all together,

And we were too little to hurt.