I Dunno Anything

I am unrecognizable to myself. I see a half-beast in the place where I last glimpsed a girl, I find a changeling in the place where I last left myself. I am a trespassing visitor here, like a ghost so deeply in love but with the wrong world. Here I lie a freshly filled grave, half girl half haunting.

I hate how they look at me. like they can see: mangled memories held up by the ones who haunt me.  trophies– trophies. my head mounted up on a wall.

I hate how they look at me. like they can see: mangled memories held up by the ones who haunt me.  trophies– trophies. my head mounted up on a wall.

I am unrecognizable to myself. I see a half-beast in the place where I last glimpsed a girl, I find a changeling in the place where I last left myself. I am a trespassing visitor here, like a ghost so deeply in love but with the wrong world. Here I lie a freshly filled grave, half girl half haunting.

I am filled with emotions I do not have names for, I cannot recognize which is coming and which is leaving, if they are even different anymore. I put up a barricade on the doors to my heart but they barge right in until they fill me in and up, rushing in like a monsoon uncaring for the wreckage in their wake. I am an occupied state, they are taking over and I am struggling with understanding who is in charge here, I tell them: this place belongs to me and you do not have an invitation to stay and they laugh when telling me:  but who created us? Do we not have a birthright to our mother? Do you not love us anymore? You used to beg for us to be here once. I used to beg for them to be here once. We used to beg for us to be here once.

There is something ugly in me. It is not an emptiness but a lacking. I remember a young boy running through Mongolian green grass and laughing at a joke. Did he know he was going to be Genghis Khan one day? Did he know his name would be covered in blood and ink and screams and gold and empires and curses? Did he lay awake mourning the loss of the fertile grounds that no longer sprang flowers because they carried too much death? Or does life happen too quickly?

I am unrecognizable to myself. I see a half-beast in the place where I last glimpsed a girl, I find a changeling in the place where I last left myself. I am a trespassing visitor here, like a ghost so deeply in love but with the wrong world. Here I lie a freshly filled grave, half girl half haunting.

I hate how they look at me. like they can see: mangled memories held up by the ones who haunt me.  trophies– trophies. my head mounted up on a wall.

I hate how they look at me. like they can see: mangled memories held up by the ones who haunt me.  trophies– trophies. my head mounted up on a wall.

I am unrecognizable to myself. I see a half-beast in the place where I last glimpsed a girl, I find a changeling in the place where I last left myself. I am a trespassing visitor here, like a ghost so deeply in love but with the wrong world. Here I lie a freshly filled grave, half girl half haunting.

There is something ugly in me. It is not an emptiness but a lacking. I remember a young boy running through Mongolian green grass and laughing at a joke. Did he know he was going to be Genghis Khan one day? Did he know his name would be covered in blood and ink and screams and gold and empires and curses? Did he lay awake mourning the loss of the fertile grounds that no longer sprang flowers because they carried too much death? Or does life happen too quickly?

We’re meeting for coffee. “You always have everything so to/get/her!” I am thinking about how my makeup is 3 days old; so far. “Nothing ever gets you down!!” The last time I took a bath, I held my breath under the water just to see how long I would have left if I tried a similar thing in the wide, blue, unforgiving ocean, being rocked back and forth and taken up and down. The water is still an abusive lover now kissing me gently now bashing my face against the wall, not pacified by my tears. I’m trying to take showers instead. “I mean, gosh, it’s just school and life are so much for someone like me. I wish I was born more like you.” I had a fight with my kitchen scale earlier because it needed to have its batteries changed right around the same time as I did too. “There’s nothing that can stop you it’s like you don’t even care what comes your way!” My heart has become the most rational organ in my system but I guess someone had to step up when they saw how broken my brain is; it’s busy building a wall up to keep the last time I felt, actually felt anything, contained; the wall is so strong Mr Gorbachev himself would approve, I’m still begging him to tear it down. “How do you do it?! What’s your secret?” The last time I got a check up my doctor asked how well I slept and I lied, I said, “ 6 to 8 hours, give or take” there was a lot to take off but it’s her own fault for leaving the ammunition to my trigger-mouth in a pamphlet on a coffee table, no lock or key in sight, it’s not safe for us pistol girls out here. I know all the correct answers even though none of them are right; my nightmares happen so often that my dreams are on hold. I can’t sleep my way out of my mind’s fog. I am nauseous and tired and successful and drained and aged. When I leave the hospital, I love and hurt; to a bystander I must look like I just gave birth but the secret is: I did, I keep giving birth to stillborn versions myself hoping one of us lives. I smile, and respond, “It’s just the coffee”.

I sleep in a house made from the explosive fabric that holds together the potential in newborn promises.  I dwell in unsaid words, in the choices not made. I am always dancing with midnight children, in a budding romance with the glittering angels hidden in the paths not taken.

I am seeking the very flowers in your eyes, let me rest my gaze on iris! Pollinated pupil; ripe. ripe with meaning, swollen with assurance. God’s tongue. You speak to me in the forgotten language of souls. I remember how we used to speak through silence before all the noise came.

There are too many corridors in this house. Too ripe for secrets. There are too many doors and too many windows in this house. The space is suffocating, eager to break free where it was trapped in its encasing. There are too many closets in this house. You hurry past them too quickly, eager to bypass the long shadowy fingers that will inevitably emerge, as they always do. Boney to the touch and desperate to be known, but you move past them quickly, a veteran of this dance. But there are too many corners in this house. Too many chest length sharp edges, shaped for you to run into in the night, designed to go for the heart. It is too strange in this house. Too familiar to be foreign. It is a step too many on stairs in the dark, the feeling of being dipped in the riptide of reality. It is too loud in this house, words are flung like wet laundry onto a wire outside, carelessly and left to hang and left to dry. It is too quiet in this house, the silence is pregnant with the things we think we see. I pity the light in this house, the unending work to knife through the fog. But it would have been a pity to not be in this house, as I am from this house, woven of this house. I carry this house on my shoulders, I carry this house in my stomach. My vomit is dirt from the flower beds where the peonies innocently bloom. There is too much of this house. There is too much of this house in me.