Smile

I have scars. And when people say that
They often mean a metaphor
Or it’s a prelude to a joke
About falling out of trees
And trying to be better
Than their brothers and sisters.
But it’s not like that for me:
Mine are small and neat,
Carved in stone and if that were true
Maybe it wouldn’t have made me smile;
And I did, you know, I smiled
While I saw the blood
And if you do it just right,
You see an empty groove first
And then it fills
Like a wadi in the desert
After the storms a thousand miles away.
 
And I suppose that’s how it works:
Though we sin, we keep on going,
Because in the end it makes us smile
When smiling seems like a hard thing to do.
 
And it made me laugh, when pretty friends
Expressed their shock and told me
It would all come to nothing.
It came to everything: if I could smile
Then I had no need for dying,
And looking back, that was the precious thing.
And in time, I found freedom and flew,
And the scars became little else,
And I thought nothing of them
And months passed: happy endings?
Maybe they would be real
 
If endings came at all.
Christmas, and I do my duty
And go home for the winter months:
Smile at my father, greet my mother
And cry at night like the old days
And I’d forgotten how much it hurt to smile.
 
And kitchen knives, they gleam in the dark.
They glitter and they smile for you:
Reflect your face, shattered in half,
And they whisper what they can do.
And maybe it’s a scene out of a horror movie:
Hack it, slash it, grit and tear,
And the blood flashes in the light of the knife
And off the white teeth in a winning smile.
 
The wadis filled again, newly carved,
And the storms a thousand times the volume
And how I’d forgotten
How much it hurt to smile.