I’ve A Pin With A Ball End Pinched Between My Index And Thumb. Ego Inflating Like Boils In Me, I Pop

What is all this?

It’s bioluminescence. You never seen it before?

No, I haven’t.

It’s little tiny creatures, every time something moves through the water they light up like itty bitty stars.

Do you eat them?

Do I-? No! They’re beautiful!

You don’t eat beautiful things?

You’re still here aren’t you?

-conversations with a siren

We could have heaven on earth, if there were no other people here but you and I. We would be shepards of animals, bearers of seeds. We would take the river home, and let it sweep us with its long cold body to our doorstep.

I want to change.

You can.

But I am afraid.

You ought to be.

I can't change.

Yes you can.

My legs are shaking. My feet are stuck in the ground.

Unstick them. Walk. Move. Change. Now!

Now?

Now.

That was when I met him. My undoing. He was like a father to me, but I was not like a daughter to him. He knew this. He knew what I saw when I looked into his eyes, and he did not look into mine, drawn into the gaps between my blouse’s buttons like black holes for morality. I was always to blame for his touches. I had always thought of myself as a girl, as a person, but really, I was a place. A place for innocence to die.

There is something so magical about the bus boy’s dish cart. Coffee cups with cold wet sugar resting on their rims, plates with forks neatly splayed out on their porcelain cheeks, saucers holding old tea bags like newborn babes. Such a security in knowing the meal is done, and carried away, and nobody can take the conversations over your dinner table with them.

I will make up for lost time.

I will make up for lost time.

I will make up for lost time.

I will make up for lost time.

I will make up for lost time.

I will make up for lost time.

I will make up for lost time.

Intelligence grand and ever expanding,

his head pounds with new ideas, while the heart in his chest beats slower,

his empathy is sluggish and cold.

The same old cruelty that ran in the veins of the cavemen is steady in him, his wisdom in vain. He has become acutely worse, torturing with metal tools instead of wooden ones, brainwashing with television instead of word of mouth, colonizing with guns instead of swords. What use is knowledge in the hands of a dominator? It becomes just another weapon, words to razors sentences to spears. Do not waste intellect on brutes, they will wound you deeper because they will know where it hurts.

Remembering him is like getting to know a shard of glass. I push my finger tip down gingerly into his jagged profile and draw tears; he is not whole anymore. He will never be whole again. I could sip tea at my window sill and watch the clouds roll on, but I prefer to live on the edges of his memory. I prefer to dwell in my scrapbooks and peak into his diaries, peeling back the brokenness of disappearance into the smoothness of understanding. Floating in the ether I am pricked again by the knowledge that no matter how deeply I learn of his soul, I cannot unplunge him from the river styx. And I am content to keep hurting, I am content to keep pressing my soft body into the recesses of his absence, if it will only bring me closer to his place in nothing. I am content in that.

The Dog’s Way

I do wish I could be gentle with myself. I really do. But my way is the dog’s way, anything I don’t like on me I chew up and swallow. I carry everything I hate in my gut because it is all I have to take. And I cannot bear to live hungry.

How pathetic. To spend my days reassuring myself that they are not wasted, all the while wasting them in trivial debates with the wretched thing in the mirror about the very topic. Why I should answer to her, I do not know. She is the opposite of me. Her left eye is where my right is, and her right eye is where my left is. Her hair is parted on the wrong side, her college chosen wrong, her days spent mindlessly, her work set to waste, what a rotten thing she is. I know who I am. And it isn't her. It can't be. Or every poor thing I think of myself would be true.