Birth to Beginnings...

They pulled a fraying rope of gold

delicately apart,

and from it

was woven

a golden rose.

One point of the ivory

compass

pointed to

perfection,

and the petals
gave

a glorious cry.

From the bloody noose

which hung a black star

underneath the boughs

of an oaken moon

was birthed

happiness,

and the freedoms

of a new

beginning.

***************************************************

I refuse to believe that I was a mistake.

God doesn't make mistakes.

But I do know that the circumstances surounding my birth were painful, and frustrating. I feel as if my mother wrapped her voluminous pale legs around my father's neck, and choke-held him until he coughed up his innocence. He handed his future over to her, broken as it was, and it trickled down as dust and shadows to me...even as she believed that she still owned them.

My mother was viciously boy-crazy. How her parents didn't understand her mood swings and emotional flips is beyond me; perhaps they were too enveloped in their own forever-failing relationship. Nonetheless, she was, and is, bipolar. She has a mental disability, and I don't blame her for that fault. After all, as my Nana says, "Be careful, love; mental illness runs in your family!"

Anyway you tell the story, the fact remains that my parents met while working at McDonald's together. He was young, foolish, and black. None of these excuses can explain why he chose to pursue my mother. She was equally young, white, and had been a mother since she was 16. At that age, when she'd first gotten pregnant, and God knows how many times she had been since then, she ran away to live with her child's father.

He wasn't too interested in her.

My father took care of the two of them. He practically adopted Katrina, my older-half sister, into his own life. He put a baby-seat in his car. Worst of all, he put up with my mother's bull. She was a screamer, she was...and a fighter. And an instigator. I remember him telling me a story...one time, when she was out of cigarette money and low on cash in general, she bitched at the man until he sold his prized comic book collection to some pawn shop somewhere in Jersey. She got her cancer-sticks, and he lost his dream of opening up a comic book shop someday in Red Bank.

Well, really, that isn't all true. He lost that dream to a father of his own that wouldn't support his endeavors, and because that comic book shop he wanted to buy was sold to that crazy Jay and Silent Bob duo who make those movies based in Jersey, but that's another story...

The point is, I wasn't meant to be born, the way I was. My parents hadn't planned it, they weren't married, and they could never have worked as a couple for longer than they did...and they only did because they wanted to make it work for us chilruns'.

I can only be greatful that I was, indeed, born - even if it meant the loss of my father's future and another stray string unraveling within my mother's frayed sanity.

More later...