sometimes,
i cannot even face you.
your soft little body riddled with guilt
and your overcompensated anger
makes me ashamed. the way you
hold yourself as though you could rile something wicked
but back out slowly of all the situations
that make you nervous. worried all the time
that someone might notice you as the chicken shit you are.
and oh, how you're afraid that someone might see you in private,
doing nothing, watching bad sitcoms and lying in bed until three,
dipping into pints of ice cream and pretending to be somewhere else
with fancier obligations.
that you pretend to be smarter than you actually are,
but you're scared of most things on your own and
you are intolerably inexperienced and naive.
terrible still, the things you think, the crippling
anxieties of death, the night terrors of white blindness
throwing you out of bed and onto the floor, screaming
into the grains of your hardwood that it just can't be.
worser are the ways you love, the agony of requited tenderness,
the boredom and the picking apart, the flaking away
of patience, the dwelling under skins of different times
and the constant questioning, excuses for hesitation
and reasons worth moving on.
you would never give a chance to someone who could truly
stay for you, who could give you something worth holding onto
without falling away and never remembering
that you were something once.
oh, but the chase...
you love the chase don't you?
the conflict and the abuse, the stigmatas of old wound demons
that kneel before you in temptation-driven
reels of film that play before your eyes in silent recollection.
but it's just never that black and white, is it?
you can't stand the idea of someone knowing all of you,
and playing with all your skeletons.
sometimes i watch you, as though i were looming above you,
the way you use your breasts to get attention,
the way you lean over counter tops and show off your neck,
how you try to hide your too-big ass with anything that will work to cover.
your shadowy voice that begs not to be so nasal all the time
and your weak-willed mumble that wants to be a feminine growl
but gets nowhere but choked.
your desires so evenly dispersed between vanilla and violence,
the shaking uncontrollable bursts of light
that yield to fingers gripped around your neck
but your hatred of having your face stroked,
or your legs encasing someone's head,
your prudish ways are tired, and i hate you
for only censoring the ones who want to stay until the morning.
sometimes i want to kill you, i want to bash your head into the wall
and play with your blood, i want to bind your flesh with strings
or throw you into rush-hour traffic. i want to torture you with sting
and put you in the sort of awkward scenarios that make you cry in public,
because there's nothing worse than that to you, is there?
do you remember the therapist who said you would be smothered
by your inability to communicate your emotions, how she was concerned
that you would turn out cold?
well you repressed it nearly long enough to forget but now
you think it might be coming true and you're so afraid of being frigid.
sometimes you are so ugly,
your gossiping and exaggerations, your little lies that come from no where
and your versions of yourself that are never constant
and depend on where you are.
how fake you are, and how transparent.
everyone can see that you are losing it, don't you know that?
sometimes i see how you might be beautiful,
catching a glimpse of you dancing in the corner of the mirror,
your thighs rubbing together in a way that's almost endearing,
your wild eyes hungry for something and your waist curved in a way
that almost looks as though it were meant to be held.
i have to say, i like your tiny feet and your hip bones,
and you are not the only one, i've heard.
yes, sometimes you are beautiful,
but i am usually drunk when you are.
and even then, there is always something to ridicule,
or to remember in wincing. how tired you must be
of putting on a show.
there's something i need to tell you:
i want you to stop pretending.
i want you to leave where you are and
be that crazy thing looming inside of you
long enough to figure out why it's come to this.
what i want to say to you mostly is,
be careful. there is no one else that i
think about more often, regard and abuse and
pity and hate and romanticize and burden and fight
and foil and try to understand.
and it's not that i can't see why someone might love you,
it's mostly that i want to know why i can't.

05/23/2008

Posted on 05/23/2008
Copyright © 2024 Lauren Singer