Revelations in the Key of K

I came awake in kindergarten, under the letter K chalked neat on a field-green placard leaned on the blackboard's top edge. They'd caged   me in a metal desk—the dull word writ to show K's sound. But K meant kick and kill when a boy I'd kissed drew me as a whiskered troll in art. On my sheet, the puffy clouds I made to keep rain in let torrents dagger loose. "Screw those who color in the lines," my mom had preached, words I shared that landed me on a short chair facing the corner's empty, sheetrock page. Craning up, I found my K high above. You'll have to grow to here, its silence said. And in the surrounding alphabet, my whole life hid— names of my beloveds, sacred vows I'd break. With my pencil stub applied to wall, I moved around the loops and vectors, Z to A, learning how to mean, how in the mean world to be. But while I worked the room around me began to smudge—like a charcoal sketch my mom was rubbing with her thumb. Then the instant went, the month, and every season smeared, till with a wrenching arm tug I was here, grown, but still bent to set down words before the black eraser swipes our moment into cloud, dispersing all to zip. And when I blunder in the valley of the shadow of blank about to break in half, my being leans against my spinal K, which props me up, broomstick straight, a strong bone in the crypt of meat I am.