Trigger warning: talk of mental illness, suicide, self harm.
"and all the world drops dead"
I wake up dead. Wondering what he’s thinking.
Is he thinking of me or someone else?
Is he comparing me to her?
Am I not funny? Do I not make him smile?
This is not me. I know the truth. I know his love.
This is my mother.
The questions she stuffed me with like a fat turkey on Thanksgiving,
They’re baked in.
It’s like a conspiracy theory,
He is out to get me. He is out to ruin me. It’s only a matter of time.
I know this is her because I am not a paranoid person.
I am trusting to my detriment, I am loving and a healer in my own
Right because I have been there, I have been alone, and I never want
Anyone else to feel that earthquake of despair.
I hang off a hang man my mom cast upon
Me in the womb.
When will he see I’m a mistake? When will he leave?
When will he realize I am a brittle shell, a heavy boulder
Slowly chipping away at his life?
There is no good in me.
She injected me every morning with beliefs,
With fear, with an amoeba that has been eating
Away at my soul (do I even have one?).
She is still hard at work in my click-swirl brain, filling it with nonsense and codes
Only I can read.
Somehow I still move. I get out of bed and put on
My loose dress, (my body shrinking just like my confidence),
And I walk, how do I walk? One foot in front of the other?
Or is it a type of floating? Toenails and elbows scraping across the floor?
Regardless, I end up at another place to sit. Another place to cry.
Another place to mull it over in my mealy mouthed mind.
I have mulled it over for decades, why don’t I just do the damn thing?
But I’m scared and people will hurt and I can take all the suffering,
But I won’t let one person suffer at the loss of me
(Even if I think their suffering is stupid), who would mourn me and why?
I have filled a house brimming with useless items, the roof is ready to burst like a volcano.
I have lost myself in the television- all ouija and poltergeist, not even
Trying to find a way out for years.
I can’t even read a book because I am too scared.
I have slit and cut and banged and slammed my body
Into concussions, lumps, stitches, shreds. Until I wish I never was.
I know I’m a mistake. No wonder my birthday is the hardest day of the year.
And sometimes I can be confident and “person” my way through it.
I go to bars and on dates, dressed up, tits out, seducing men
And magically convincing them that I am more than a broken down
Warplane with PTSD. And I drink it all stiff. And I smoke it all hot,
And I drive them wild.
And “for a minute there I lost myself.” But they all leave.
Just the way she promised me, as she rocked me to sleep in my onesie,
Only holding me because if she didn’t I would cry, and holding a mistake
Is easier than letting it keep you up all night with its wailing and gnashing of teeth.
I make plans, I arrange that plaster smile, brightening it with lipstick
Dressing in my costume. Smile and wave like the skeleton beauty queen I never will be.
In the motorcade, my hand waving a fraud, my eyes sulk back into my head until I see the
Black wispy smoke that’s filling my brain, and I climb out of the car like Jackie-O
Grabbing bits of his brain.
And my feet grind across the pavement and I collapse.
The chasm opens and I float down (lead balloon that I am).
And I stay there. I stay there a long time. And it’s fear. And it’s death.
And it’s the most sharp and ruddy suffering I have ever been through
(And I have suffered many things).
I dig my hands in the dirt, so much dirt under my nails that they begin to fall off.
I can’t sleep. I eat less, full of guilt for taking a single bite—because she wouldn’t.
The only way out is death. But I’m scared. So I wait and I go to my appointments
I take my pills, and I sleep and I cry.
After awhile (could be days, has been years) a ladder
Is thrown down, not sure by whom, and I wait a few days, staring at it,
Capsizing in my readiness to live again, like bobbing for an apple.
Then I climb up, then I climb out, and I wash my hands and I move forward,
Always waiting for it to happen again.
And like a stalker, like my mother, like a villain in a horror film,
It always comes back. And like a fighter,
I always climb out.
