You'll never meet another person
whose awful behavior
and horrible pain
doesn't ultimately make sense.

All you have to do is look deeper
into the abyss
from which it flows,
to see.

I know this
as firmly
as anything.
It is a core truth,
of basic reality,
which so far has yet to yield
even one false ring.

So when she sat down
across from me
in the baggy orange jump suit
having already confessed to the priest with the gold badge,
I knew there was more to the story.

Like I already said,
there always is.

A year later,
she wrote from prison,
thanking me,
saying she was happier there
than she'd ever been
out in the world
and ending the letter with the confession
that connected the dots
as to why she picked up the knife
in the first place.

It wasn't the fact
of what he did
to deserve opening his gut.
It was all the others
just exactly like him,
piling up inside
such that
the accumulated pain
finally, after so many years,
required a response.

Funny how it is though
that after she offered up this little glimpse,
she went on to explain
why she never told me everything
in the first place.

It seems the knife part
for which she accepted
the assigned blame
was not so bad to admit.

But,
the things they did
to her
not just him, but all the others,
well,
of those things
good girls
never speak.