Guarded

                           

Like a road map to a forbidden treasure

Like an index to book of spells

Scars tell stores

Of forgotten stings

Some tiny, some tremendous

They narrate a whole volume 

Of life lived. 

Like cryptic clues 

To cares and gains

Like windvanes guiding the seas

Scars divulge

The dark interiors

Scars sustained from the rims of hot oven shelves

Burning tattoo like patterns

Scars on knees from bygone days

Of childhood falls and adolescent plays

Scars form hormones blazing the skin

Acne marks unfolding the fledgling

Scars of vaccines,

Surgical incisions announcing the offspring

Scrapes from nasty falls,

Running down the spine

And then some birthmarks 

As a mark of the divine.

Perhaps unhealed from another lifetime.

Scars whisper secrets well kept

Like passwords to guarded possessions.

But these are ones that meet the eye.

Those concealed ones, in the troughs of one's heart

Those scars shrouded, like tombs of angst, 
like unseen lesions

Lay there, in the hollows of the soul's ocean

With debris of shipwrecks

Seeking solace in the stubborn abyss

Invisible, undiminished
 In unfathomable depths.