Long Ride Home

On the bus I sat next to a handicap girl who danced to the overly loud music I was using to drown out the shakes. I get those sometimes, but mostly around people. They all start to look like eggs bobbling around and I hear the tension of each of their chicks scratching at the eggs' surfaces- clawing and begging to get out. The sound gets kind of numb and dull but there's a ringing inside of my head to sing out over the roar. Everything gets hot and beads of sweat form on my brow right before the nausea sets in. The tremors start in my chest as I constrict my body to try to fight back, but they ignore my defense and squirm through my appendages. Everything begins to fade into a deep well of blackness.

I shiver and my eyes burst open as I reemerge to the surface.

No one has noticed my world crashing and I am grateful.

Slug

My back is broken from the world; it collapses my spine one vertebra at a time to make me small, to make me cower before it. You see, I've lost, or at least I've been losing for quite some time, and it's not the fault of the people around me as much as they want it to be. The truth is I am mushy. I hate to move quickly, I hate to say my funny thoughts, I hate to make people think I am anything more than an equal to the chair that they are sitting in. I need a shell. I need a shell; I am mushy.

I thought I was strong, witty, and fun to be around until I remembered what I was when I was a child. I was unafraid to be ridiculous, climb too high in trees, move a little too fast, breathe hard. Everything from the era of feeling has seemed to dissipate in the monotonous days I am thrust into. I'm not so sure I like the part of me that was aged in the process. That is to say, I have more knowledge and understanding of the world but my wonder did not grow in the same sense. 

I grew up in a bamboo forest where the water rippled past and quenched my soul, and I dug deep into the earth to squeeze the grubs below. I danced in a ridiculously tribal manner swiveling around my walking and no one existed. 

I don't want to be old, and I want to stop getting older because it hurts. While my bones are achy, it gets much worse: I can feel the anxiety of just having to exist in a world I don't fit into piercing my rib cage with such vigor. I've always known that my body would age in a grim way, but I never imagined my emotions to age in such a way as this. Everything sparks this dim hatred, this feeling that I am serving men who don't deserve it. 

I want to make something beautiful on its own, not something I create in response to the suffering being inflicted on me. There is already a natural order of suffering, so why do men take it upon themselves to amplify the pain in every one of us? Pain is treated like a common place event when it doesn't have to be. 

As humans we have to deal with loss constantly, which is something that is inevitable and what makes us all the same. Loss is a natural thing because time and age does exist and we get wiser in this measurement. The unnatural suffering is derived from what is taken from us and while a majority can relate to this, is it something that can so easily be diminished if the greed of the minority was wiped away with it. 

I am here to love and be loved.

I am here to smile and make people smile.

I am fighting for that, but I have been turned into a slug that people are waiting to throw salt on because I move slowly and stick to my surroundings. I don't take a definite shape of the culture therefore I must be ugly. I must be. 

Woman Warrior

It was amazing.

I looked in the mirror and saw a woman.
I've never noticed age in such a way in myself.
My brain in unraveling, swelling and convulsing.
But I, I am a woman.

What's that writing on your everything?

Shipman, I allude you.

No.
No I won't.
Sometimes the world just makes it hard for me to exist.
The problems.
And no one even understands what I'm saying; I might as well be speaking a different language.

I like to be in my underwear and I'm betting you do too.
All of us just sitting in our underwear, hunched over, straining to read a screen.
It's a fact that we are not being sexy in our underwear.
We are existing in our underwear.

I clip my toe nails while I'm wearing my underwear.
I pop pimples while I'm wearing my underwear. 
I am not a sexy underwear-wearer.  And, I suppose, not sexy in general.

Conversation

I keep walking these circle, these monotonous circles. And I can't stop walking in these circles, these circles around you. But you keep walking straight, from point A to point B, so seemingly efficient. And sometimes I cross your line and I nod at you. Mostly because I'm sure I agree.
I keep trying to walk beside you, to walk your straight path, but inevitably I end up in the trench of circles I have paced deeply into the ground. I watch from below, jealously, as you walk your tightrope above me.



You're so beautiful as you dance from point A to point B; a wail, a bellow, a roar of sincerity.

Rigamortis

It's a cold, metal table and it's icing his back. There's no circulation; there's no blood, except for in his black fingertips and deep purple elephant ears. All that mattered is taped down and glued shut: his bright blue, enchanting eyes, his dinosaur teeth rimmed with metal, his heart that lapped up blood steadily for decades. There's nothing but a casing, a void, a volume, filled with embalming fluid. A body suffering of rigamortis. A cold, naked, hard body. A patriarch that ruled over 4 houses, that sat at the head of the table each night with a piece of buttered bread beside his meal, now lying on his back with nothing real left in him.

A good man died this day.