Knee-scrape Memories

Knee-scrape memories are a personality
of sorts, if you believe that reckless childhoods mean more or less
the same as a reserved kid in teen-years age
who is afraid of fish touching their calf when they stand
in the shallow waters of the ocean by the beach
trying desperately to think of something other than being perceived.

A child who was wounded by their lack-of-fear to die
grows up wounded by their lack-of-will to live.
What made them stays in memory nothing more than the comprehension
of the dichotomy between knee-scrapes versus scars on wrists.

Pray a once-upon-a-time to a tooth fairy
who in a flourish of glitter and singing and lights
might bring as gift an imprint
that upon a close examination
will reveal a cell-like ghostly-matter
which you will recognize as devoutly belonging to you.

It’s a game of riddles, then:
thus a hero’s journey begins.
Follow the breadcrumbs—if you know what they look like.
Kids always find their way home, but for you,
who have grown into a conglomeration of dichotomies
(knee-scrapes versus scars on wrists)
the hero gets nothing but lost. That is the point of it all.

Not a journey, but a chase—
chasing down a past to form a personality
of sorts. Because when they ask
who you are, they don’t want to hear
what you are now, they want to hear
what you once were and how, then,
you’ve become a person.
You are dictated
by a conglomeration of explanations and excuses
that make you or break you: one of a kind
or the same kind as many.

Tell them a once-upon-a-time and they will listen
like the tooth fairy
coming to greet you in a conscious state of dreaming
about a past that makes sense
bringing as gift a kid who never learned
to comprehend their own dichotomies.
Like magic, then they see
the person whom you might have been
if fish would not have terrified you
but they do, and you think, as such
that there could have been a kid
who got to find their breadcrumbs
and you see, then, that we are all
praying a once-upon-a-time to a tooth fairy
who may, one day, instead of cell-like ghostly-matters
as a gift, bring us a kid
who never ceased to find joy in knee-scrapes.