The Gaps That Got Me Here
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Smalls flocking knee-high
gap-grinned, sleepy eyed,

and it was the gaps that led me here.

My coffee stained early morning mind thinks:
can't be too hard
just watching some kids
just writing a poem about children--fresh faced, unknowing
rubbing in the gaps
between their sticky snack covered hands
and me at 4, mouth stuffed with crayons.

A child marked, a life ticked by
church basements
theater storage bins.

And like the spaces in a Family Circus line,
the gaps led me here
leading Chalice Children
remembering my faked smiles
not believing their unthinking giggles or spurtles of spit
remembering...

Fourteen-year-old backs against trees
bumpy spine bumping on
uneven bark
hard and sure
against my shoulders, hips, back of head.

So much like, too much like
my kindergarten fingers wrapped around
playground woodchips
splintering under nails and creeping under waistbands.
Recess sun turned to fall shadow
by a spiralling yellow slide,
the kind of thing toddlers tumble down,
fall headfirst,
headlong in love, drawing dotted lines like wildfire
--some things you can't control.

My childhood nightmares grew up
into my favorite things:
playgrounds and wolves,
breath on my neck,
hands clamped around my wrists,
the shape of his mouth,
the way his bottom lip shivered,
hiding places and couches folding into caves,
long dry fingers down the front of my pants
and the back.

Children tumble headfirst but rise up sprinting
rise up screaming to the sand table
improbable crackers in unnatural colors.
Children run around me,
legs and arms pinwheeling,
reminding me how unlikely this job is:

Bitter as my coffee breath,
I wake up early for bright bougsie-eyed idealists.
Wasn't I the one who hated children?
The one who grew up fast and on purpose,
just to escape?  Promises and hope, faked smiles,
dotted lines--

those tiny ass motherfuckers get another shot
chances people took from me,
with eyes and hands.
Quiet words and the month of May,
chances people took with me.

It was the gaps that led me here,
gaping
between my anger and anything useful,
between the lies I told myself and those I told my mother,
between how much I want to hate childhood
and how much I crave it,
the space between his trembling lips
and her uneven teeth.

It was the gaps that got me here.