She smoothes her son’s hair, sloe-dark and lathered in oil,
sweeps her fingers through it slowly, as she did when they were wild curls in youth,
and later the tiniest of black buzz-cut bristles, back when
he still trusted her to cut it for him.

She’s done this many times before.
Every night when he was first birthed, in wonderment and adoring;
a few more here and there as he grew older, and farther from her.
She’d slide her fingers into the softness like spiders on those nights when he fell asleep early,
too early to push her away.

But it is later now, too late, and he
is more than accounted for.
Teeming with inks, mauled by needles and steel, adorned by the touches
of a thousand different hands, a thousand different people.
Her fingers are aged, brittle. He doesn’t need them anymore.
Just a place to sleep and money to spend,
and someone at whose timid words he can laugh into his beer
without delivering insult,
without entering that place
where wrongs become unforgivable.

A/N: Don't know that the title works. Any thoughts?