And The World Doesn’t Agree With Me

My time is 15.
I am round cheeks
and naked with definition.
I don’t know how to hide under
the thick film that buries me later.

He is built with reddish, muddy hair.
He flares and expands in size,
greater than any other young torso.
I watch him hold hands with Grace
and Innocence, I listen to him
sing with rebellion and defiance.
He strums, and he strums me along
to the quiet, unexposed nights.

My time is 16,
and he has left. He has found liberty;
liberty, or abandon.
I have found a stuffy old pharmacy.
I sit on sidewalks eating tiny tablets, remembering
abandon from times: 8, 9, and 10; it is
sadly comfortable,
like I am with him.

3 months later, he brings back the East Coast.
His air is accented and tired,
thick for me to breathe.
He smells like 15, though, and he tastes like
the cigarette we shared on the night he left.
He brought himself and his guitar
just to me,
and he strings, and he strings me along
to the quiet, prudish night for two more weeks,
and then he is gone.

Now, I listen to the music,
to motorcycles drive by
my dark basement, with strings that
I will learn to play later.
Not yet, it is not time for me yet.

Right now, the film is building.
Right now, I am being defined.
Abandon has timed itself, lined perfectly
with my over-exposed skin.
I need him.

Now.
Later.
I need him.
I will,

and the world will never agree with me
and nobody believes me.

Sclerotic Dolls

Back to my dolls. Back to familiar,
sclerotic faces.
Mother gave me one to paint. I chose
the sea for her eyes
and
cuspidated obsidian for her mouth.

She was a fill-in.

Mother howled in on muscle pills,
red cheeked fury
steaming the air, burning my hair from
its soiled roots! My bedroom door opened
itself out of her way, scarred from past poundings.

I dove under my bed, throwing
my rock-like doll to stand as daughter.
She never turned into an
apple-polished quail. She just stood.

I laid in yellow paint under
bed frames; thick structure.
And never gave Sclerotic Doll
a name.

 

My Monsters

The monsters are awake,
lurking around
upstairs.  They hide out in the most
trimmed places;
stomping through the garden of adequacy, bathing
their filth in competency.

They awake me from agitated
sleep, speeding my attention away from the immune
hard-wood floor to
the bed of pins and needles they have
prepared.

The doctor says I have a choice.
I chose capsules.
(That was not the correct choice, they say)
I agree. The capsules do
not keep the monsters
away
or help me Rest In Peace – a
choice the doctor says is not a choice.

I am left with a capsule and the monsters,
swallowing the capsules with a pitcher of
beer – attempting a “submerge and die”, but they
have wicked
enamel on their
sharp little fangs and the capsule
is made of gel.

My monsters sink in their teeth and
shred open the pill
releasing the promised relief – One monster snatches a
handful and a thousand more follow, till
all the magical comfort
is stolen.

I can’t say I blame them – they
have an addiction. If these capsules do
what the doctor has promised, I would want a
piece of it, too.