To Myself, Age Eight
By Jacob Hetrick
A kid’s brain is a demented thing
filled with slime and gunk and G.I. Joe,
grasshopper legs and dog slobber and sawdust,
Pokémon and Inuyasha and PlayStation,
a fragmented mirror that reflects in miniature
a thousand facets of family, of given love and learned hate,
and in between the cracks in the glass you can see
the backboard of the person to be.
My home was a hollow conch
that echoed with screams instead of waves
and when I crawled off the bus, I found that that the screams followed,
echoing inside my head until they shot like vomit from my mouth,
ripping apart everything in their wake.
My classmates, the poor fuckers, were secondhand victims
of the bile that boiled inside me
of the white-hot rage of an eight-year old boy.
I bit, I punched, I stabbed,
with teeth and fists and pencils and slurs—
a menace to all creation and most education,
I was locked away in suspension for most of my elementary years.
Sitting alone in a cramped closet filled with printer paper,
I lived out my days in isolation, in school but without friends
with only paperbacks and mechanical pencils for companions,
their voices a silence that only incited the echoes in my head.
Sometimes I want so badly to stretch a hand through the glass
to touch the me that no longer is,
to tell him what he needs to hear, to let him know
that no matter what he hears in his shell of a home
that the bile grows mild with age, like a pepper in the sun,
and that I will always be here for him
that I will always love him
for whom could I love, if not him?
