Tattoo

My nest is made of stones and sticks and wool that's wet, an itchy mix. Its sides are built from wire barbed and nettles brown and glassy shards. That nest began in fifty-five with helpless baby laid inside, newborn infant left outside then wasps attacked and how she cried. Add these stingers to my nest, thirty times they stung my chest, line the nest with great disdain and barrels full of wrenching pain. Be sure to add some stinging slaps, pawn off the wounds to kid's mishaps, leg cut and bleeding, bone laid bare, they walk by like I'm not there. So line the nest with mass confusion, senselessness and mute collusion. Add countless eyeballs staring blind, for what you see is in your mind. Four years old in terrible pain, many days in bed she'd lain, so very weak she'd had to crawl and beg them to give the doc a call. Add to the nest a pox and curse: infection, pus, appendix burst. The surgeon wasn't sure she'd live, a 50-50 chance he'd give. Now rim the nest with brains and blood and tears enough to make a flood. Add bullets with their copper glow, some sharp reminders of grief and woe. Pad the nest with each mistake, paint it black with each heartbreak, add broken bed springs, spirals of rust for each betrayal and breech of trust. No wonder, then, it's hard to rest, in such a torment-ridden nest.