honeydunce

I have tried not to miss the things I never had to begin with, and the things I had but halved and gave away to better suit another someone’s taste I have caught a sunset bleeding through the pines coming back from Canada. I have breathed deep to entertain the concept of the contact high. I have taken scissors to fistfuls of hair; I have ground the blades through the follicles, snipped and swept away from eyes in hiding. I bit my lip until it bled. I wrote until my hand cramped into a full minute claw with spasms like little roses popped and blooming in vein vines to the elbow, the upper. I have read my name in print, and printed my name, and signed my story, erased it, scribbled again. I have caught squints of timber splinters in my thumb. I have wasted things like food and words and time. I have bled through hospital gowns, and I have taken my seat gingerly for six weeks, until I stole away to come under my own hand violently–alone, and healed. I have carried objects that were too heavy in the snow and I did not drop them. I have perhaps too much faith in other people and I have too little left over for myself and perhaps this is what keeps me going or maybe it is what stands in my way. Either way. I have watched the older women whip their mouths to crow out tongue and touch their cheeks and foreheads to pew seats still warm from asses, and I have watched them beg for Jesus like they are afraid and lonely and scared of this place, this Earth, their personal hells. I have been the age of seven. I have slow danced to Motown and held a baby and I tried to remember being that small and held and looked after. I have run out of things to try to be. I have waited for my heart to give out and pretended to be asleep. I have let conversations unfurl millions of limbs that seemed restless and endless, tributaries with medusa roots for flowing manes of twig and twine. I stayed up all night just to keep talking to my roommate, just to hear her slow drawl on syllables. We had so many similar instances—battles in our bones and rapes at parties. I have never been allergic to cats. I have held hands that struck me. I have tossed my sheets to the floor and left beer bottles on the windowsill. I knocked them over once every other day. I have snarled at mirrors. I have sad shoulders, rounded forwards that reveal everything about bad posture. I have a spine that is a little off center, a little to the right. I have fingernails that like to stay dirty, and scars that bumrush my pigment, when the melanin is out and blasting like a boombox in the blazing sun—they come out like pinpricks of stars. I asked for a glass of nothing with two cherries stabbed on a plastic sword, and received it. I have no idea what happened to that bartender; I hope it was something good since he was so into doing thoughtful things like that. Not many bartenders will make the time to give a glass of nothing with cherries and a sword. Maybe he knew that I was in trouble.

I have a heart that hurts me, a heart that I adore, a heart that I let cut in front of mind all the time when standing in turn for decisions. I have a strange dedication to that. I have a habit of talking too fast and out of turn. I speak before I think when I feel on fire, and it’s not fair to be sorry about such a thing. I have moments with pain; it’s chronic. I have tremors after the bad ones—if it’s morning I hide them around objects and in pockets, in my lap or on the cat. I have lied to be left alone and there were times it did not work and more times I did not care. I have been held and pushed away and I can do both with one in each palm, serving them into home overhand.