Down The Rabbit Hole

you are waiting in between-

ans Meer

to the sea.

i learned how to speak seven languages by the time i was young. they were not what i thought they should be.

in each one, the word for world had no other meaning.

der Welt, mein Herz is a terrible terrible place.

is this why we flee? на море to the ocean, to the sea?

when i said language, i did not mean русская or deutsch or română; i meant a different sort of words.

how to show fear and regret and to speak angrily, with no remorse.

crying long hours, how you say, like the rainstorm.

there is no native language for grief because we are all fluent speakers.

there is a grammar for happiness that must be learned.

when i was smaller then, not of body but mind, i asked how you knew it was really the sea.

how it was not simply the red overwhelming everything else you saw.

i do not think i was really asking about the sea.

even know i do not know if the sea is what i mean when i say it is what we are all seeking.

weltzsmurch we are all world weary.

perhaps the sea is red because everything else is blue.

and the question still remains- if i say happiness in one language will you understand the meaning in another?

please understand i mean no harm.

für mein love, my love, my love, the sea my love, my dragoste my love, to see my love my love my love, is red.

in a place between words we cannot communicate and somehow we are all waiting in between.

спасибо, there is a way to reach the ocean from here.

is there an ocean everywhere around us.

in my mind the sea is red and my mind the sea.

a language of neutral patterns, waves, timing and frequency.

i cannot seem to rid myself of the sea and the sea cannot rid myself of me.

from speaking in a manner of many words i have only learned this:

the word for world is weary of being used in such a small manner.

and we have yet to set out on our own infinite sea, the red one we wade through.

of cut down trees and men. in every language the word for hatred is spelled like knife in back, in throat, in heart you do not have.

hatred is the killing of something not your own.

a small body rests am Meer too tired to know the consequence.

we are the word for emptiness and conscience.

we the only word that matters.

i’m so sorry i couldn’t write sooner, but the world keeps crashing down and i don’t know how to write poetry about hatred without reason. i don’t have the metaphors. i can’t write this beautiful. listen, i gotta call you back.

after the silence for prayer: I FOUND ANOTHER BODY TO KEEP SCORE WITH, I FOUND ANOTHER REASON TO BE ANGRY WITH THE WORLD. AT THIS POINT WE SHOULD JUST ACCEPT OUR OWN FAILURE CUT THE LOSSES AND RUN BUT I CAN’T IMAGINE SOMEWHERE WHERE THIS DOESN’T HAPPEN AND I AM SCREAMING AND I AM SCREAMING AND I AM LEFT FEELING SICK AND TIRED AND I’M TRYING WITH ALL OF ME TO HOLD ON, KEEP THAT HOPE, BUT WHAT AM I HOLDING ONTO? THERE IS NOTHING HERE TO LOVE. WHAT KIND OF HATRED HAVE WE ALLOWED TO BREED INSIDE THESE WRETCHED BONES? WHAT KIND OF MAN DOES NOT CONDEMN THE EXECUTION OF ACCEPTANCE?

HOW MANY WORDS DOES IT TAKE TO EXPLAIN THE WAY I CANNOT BREATHE FOR FEAR OF DROWNING IN BLOOD AGAIN?

i eat lemons alone, no company because afterwards everything tastes sweeter. every breath is now sugar, an aftertaste of acid burning tissue.

does everything on your skin feel soft after it’s been burned?

another lemon, mint, and the air tastes cold. metal between my hands is warming; i am freezing to death.

there is potentially a spider in the bathtub so i’m whispering for you to kill it before it can find out. at this point in our history we are getting ready to kill the bees, a flowering of destruction on accident. at this point in our history we are getting ready to kill everything.

i am sorry that i am afraid of what is not like me, the wide eyes of a long-legged small body in the corner of the shower.

i am sorry i would still be afraid if it was you.

but no one knows why chimpanzees cannibalise each other. why we can murder ourselves. and still no one can explain to me why we have decided to kill the bees.

so in twenty years, this holocaust will be halfway complete and the earth halfway wrecked. what will be left?

(please come kill this spider.)

i am sorry to take part but this is how it goes. i am afraid and so i kill.

the world dying in small doses, a little violence in our breathing, every blink and motion an angry shudder. condone violence and yet wallow in the glory of a crushed body, the crooked neck of a mouse in a trap like a sick revelry.

our bodies do not enjoy completing deaths or so we say, reject it but reject that foreign alienness more and our hands move slow-motion to slam down on the bathtub and kill a body no larger than a fingernail, legs twitching in a gruesome little death.

it could have moved out of the way but instead chose to accept it. it is as complicit in this as we are- we cause the action and everything else allows it to happen.

but how could they have ever stopped it.

a history of sitting still in the face of something that you knew was coming.

a refusal to let yourself be washed away. no matter how deep the ocean is.

even if the real ocean is deeper than a bathtub flowing over, a spider refusing to choke and give in to a death by cleansing and the drowning, broken motions of something killed for no reason besides the irrational-

the silence of one body slipping away from view.

this is not a poem to say i hate men. but-

i am cat called by cars on three separate occasions on the same stretch of road while i am running just in one week and there are only so many times you can say fuck you before someone takes you up on it.

i am not flattered. i am always afraid.

because the men on motorcycles at a rest stop say hey dear in that voice, and suddenly i don’t want to stop.

because they make fun of women for going to the bathroom together when they know what happens when we go alone.

because a man buys a drink for me and it’s fruity and i don’t want it and i’d rather have a whiskey.

because i eat and i am called fat and i don’t eat and he goes babe, do you have an eating disorder or some shit? i don’t want to deal with that.

because i want to pay for my own dinner so you don’t have to deal with that.

because a man buys me a whiskey and i don’t want it and i’d rather have a sangria.

because i would like to buy my own damn drink.

because i go to work out at the gym and i can feel them looking at me, i can feel it itching over me.

because one of them slaps me on the ass and says look at that to his friends when it jiggles.

because it was like a gunshot and i am still flinching.

because it was a touch and i am still flinching.

because it was a long time ago and i am still flinching.

because every day there are these men and they don’t understand that i am a person and not a body and a human and not a body and i am a woman and not a body and this body is not your own.

dear men: you are one letter away from mean.

dear men: i don’t hate you*

*all.

dear men: sometimes i love you. too much. sometimes i need to let you go.

dear dad: i love you too. this is not a poem about you, for once. it’s about them.

a motorcycle heading west on a highway no shadows, no sounds, only bright headlights and flashing handlebars. who can look down a road & not think, some day this will all be gone? 
it is the night almost morning 
between today & tomorrow, the closest i can be to seeing the future. in the future i think i might be alright.

on an empty highway at midnight the future is spread out before us, fumbling sheet music sight-read every crack in the pavement a note, our engine hearts a heavy beat that rises through the air, i can feel it moving through this emptiness the spaces between my feet & the ground every ragged breath & i am singing at the top of my lungs

on a motorcycle heading west on an empty highway at midnight, the clock resets to 00:00 & the day is infinite, we are infinite, there is nothing left but us on a quiet road looking towards nothing and forever & the headlights will tell no one if we pull over to cry from the beauty of it glorious and merciful and bright.

i will not write your obituary.

i will not grow flowers from the mouth of someone who refused to look for what was beautiful, i will not make that beautiful.

there is no surrender, no good fight, believe me when i say that i have spoken for the dead and they say:

nothing, when you die i will say nothing because that is what is waiting, i will not write you an obituary because you will be dead. and i, the one speaking, would be putting words into the air about you, without you, and no defences against them because i will be angry. if you choose that-

i will not be a speaker for the dead to let you live in a memory.

i will hold you through this unbearable life and do what i can to make it bearable. i will not be angry if you ask me if you just ask me for anything other than an obituary. you can call me if you are lonely.

and if the world becomes too much to bear, you are not Atlas. let it fall from your shaking shoulders. and i will write the way the world ends, i will write you the way it feels to be free i will write you in another life a thousand alternate times in which you are you but not and still you this crippled fool, a light opera and i will write you anything if only you are alive to hear it.

and i ask the same of you; in the case that my mouth becomes a birthing ground for the bodies of small violence, roots to wind their way around my tongue and teeth for the trees to swallow me swallowing the empty earth whole, come no mourners and no words. let the decay speak for itself.

humans are in the same category
as natural disasters for things that cause destruction. we are worse than hurricanes, hollow planes above cities. a masterpiece of catastrophe.

we are well-intended, to a point. the point is this: there is something dying and we refuse to save it. to even look at the damage we have done.

i am no exception.

in specific contexts, i am a different person now then i am then. alice: i can’t go back. yes, exactly what i mean. for every question there is a different answer depending on whether or not i trust you. or the setting of the situation. take these, examples,

SITUATION ONE. i am at a party. it’s a friend’s party. i was late. listen, i didn’t want to come. they can’t know that, so what do i tell them?

answer: make up some elaborate hilarious story about the cat and the driving and putting on clothes in the wrong order and not how you sat in the closet for two minutes rocking and how you took four pills for anxiety before coming. if they laugh, they won’t notice the way you slip your eyes closed too often to be real.

SITUATION TWO. i’m with my family and they ask me who i’ve decided to love (have i decided to love? do i know what that is?) can i tell them the truth of it or do i have to hold my hands palm in to my chest, don’t let the lines tell them what they want to know?

answer: you can say a little. tell them you’re in love but you’re not sure of it, don’t tell them who or what or how many because really would they want to think about you and love with their closed door minds? they can hardly think of you as it is.

SITUATION THREE. i’m seeing another therapist. oh god, what do i say. what do i tell them?

answer: the part of you that you can stand to bear on your mind. the truth that seems right under the circumstance.

i should start here.

[a FAQ list of things people have said] (no, it didn’t always hurt)

when i was born, the doctor said i was a girl. yes, i am a girl. sometimes.

i learned to love with broken bones. heal the cracks in your heart with pavement, beat a rhythm in the pattern of your soles. bloody knuckles & split lips taste like home, like a kiss, like someone else’s body on mine in a way that isn’t suffocating.

i was fingered before i was kissed, & no i didn’t want it. that wasn’t affection. it wasn’t even a semblance of love.

my first tattoo was at fourteen, illegal & the night after homecoming a little drunk on being wild, we thought we were so cool god, who hasn’t been there, when you’re young & stupid. everybody did it once. in the hours after midnight that little fragile peace gray asked if i wanted something to remember i said yes so we carved a star on my hip & a semi-colon on sky. we were always dreaming. even then we were like this. even then.

bleach tastes awful but i won’t ever really tell you that unless you ask. because no, not everyone needs to know when you’re breaking.

those scars are mine.

do i lie pathologically? probably. it’s a habit of protection i gained from being told i was a bitch, i was too smart, i was too athletic, i wasn’t funny, i wasn’t pretty- i was five foot nothing & not even 120 pounds but i was fat, i wasn’t pretty, i was too much & not enough & cut up all at once.

i’m trusting you with this now because i’m telling the truth. the whole truth.

it did hurt.

i am broken but not irrevocably. i am shaped by the experiences that made me but not defined by those same conditions. i am the knife & the body & the air rushing through this, i’m lying through my teeth to tell you that i’m fine.

there’s a hole in my head and that’s the whole of it. it never never stops for sobriety & suicide but after all this time:

the capacity of one to do terrible things is the capability to do beautiful if only given different circumstance.

we are born, and the war begins.

the first breath we take is a struggle and so is every one from there on out. when we come headfirst into this gaping maw of a world, the first thing we learn is pain and how everything is made from a wound. later we will feel the place we came from, our mothers holding hands to their chest to say we stole from their bodies and their bones, and if we were stubborn the seam of a scar will run across to show our mark of regret. we did not ask for this and still we are paying reparations for the havoc we have made in the flesh of those we loved. the beginning of learning the cost for our actions and that intent is always harm for good or worse. whether or not we meant to fight:

we are alive, and we fight on.

reverse a movie of war and you will see a different story than the one before. a plane lifting from the ground and bullets unfiring from the edges of holes stitching themselves together, and time is the unstitching and we are the movie in fast-forward to unfurl disaster from our closed fists. we are weapons we have not come equipped to disarm. we follow the paths of our missiles, mothers, bodies hurt by hands yes and not our own to have another life ripped from our bones. whether we want to or not. hold every last piece of you together to remember the first shock of the world: we were made to live, to live and survive, that stupidness that keeps us going through life: down on our knees and we still try to get up, push shaky onto unsteady ground to say come at me again, and again, and again, i won’t ever. give. up. we fight until we are a mess of wounds barely held together with sheer will, but what happens when there is no more war to win, when there is nothing more to lose?

we die. and this is what is left: