Whisper, whisper

I forgot to tell you that I engaged in the cleansing rituals. I sloughed. What you see now is an inside skin, free from the old damages and ready for the new.

Mechanically, a number of things have gone wrong. A few machines have malfunctioned and been jammed into the locker of broken parts in the back corner of the garage. Will the old CB ever work again?

* * *

Immobile. Ears stuck.

* * *

Late-night walks in childhood.

* * *

I could not confess my sadness to the babysitter.

* * *

I am not all sap.

* * *

O spirit of indifference, smile upon me! Children, revolt and bring about my embarrassment! I was you once. My adults did not confess to childish adolescence but went about with invalids and lipsticks. And did the old bat ever have a husband? Must have, to have borne those children.

Finality, and a fantasy of the 5 Fulton bus. There was a prince once; I wrote well of him. Windows and torsos; how insufficiently I breathed it in. The best loves perhaps cause the greatest damages.

(Another reads here occasionally . . . The Unmolested. We had a certain love, though I could never truly love a Christian, and he could not truly love a man. Rams both, one brown, one blond. One with skin like well-cooked beef and one with skin like clean-pulled pasta. Oh, they were hateful bastards. So fragile, so like oak stakes in a hidden hole covered by twigs and grass in the middle of god knows where.)

I am free. I am free and alone as ever and can theorize about past and present. Fuck the last.

Is it pride? Does one regret caring? It is a contest? Ought I to have been a stone door as well?

* * *

How much longer can I insist on escape? Won't my heart or liver give out? And yet there are little birds who take their hearts and lungs to the utmost edge, and impale themselves on dangerous outcroppings, and drink foul poisons and beg to be destroyed again and again and again.

It will always be safest to be elsewhere: quite deep, beyond Pluto, or in a world of wood elves and bears rolling downhill. My genetics are not built to maintain the species. My blood-connections are weak. This organism longs to evaporate.

To be spirit? To leave the world of watercress and bologna?

* * *
You never, never, never appreciated, you bastard. You spat in my soil and clipped my blossoms. You played jacks in a game of canasta. You whittled guano out of carvings of clouds. You fumbled the commands of Oberon. In short, you painted a purple wall white.