#noncursed

"I got my heart handed to me tonight, all bloody and frail, like a newborn colt. I thought I was going to write you a sweet poem “tender green over fragrant flowers” but today I love no one.

I’m the gravedigger’s broken guitar. I saw a granite box with my father’s bones inside. I walked this land biting back tears of contempt. I ran my nails through the mud on my tights.

At dawn I sat slowly on the edge of my mattress and put on my armor, piece by piece. The chest and neck always come first, because the dead never look comfortable in coffins.

Don’t take your eyes off me now—I’ll give you a show. I’ll curse your land, I’ll spit in the face of your god. I’ll laugh as they drag me and tie me to the stake. What does it matter to me, if you don’t care either? Isn’t it only fear that brings you to your knees?

Before our names Before our jobs Before the gods Before our parents Before our empty beds Before our lovers and friends Before the closed gates When do we come? I’m on my knees, can’t you see? I have worn off my voice howling at the sky And there is no answer

No golden cherub in a cloud Singing of mercy and endless love There is no one waiting for our kind We’re the ducks or were the wolves when there is hunting season among the tall grass

We know in our hearts where the issue comes from: the desire for community, the touch starvation—physical and emotional—bred by years of virtual attempts at relationships, or the lack of them. “Giving a fuck” where it isn’t deserved. Trying to comply with the expectations of unknown faces, for whom our own faces and realities are equally unknown. We struggle to put the question into practice:

“Why would I care?”

Yet we circle back to the same place; we care too much, we can’t help it. Is it in our nature as social animals? Then why are some people able to ignore injustice and horror with such ease? Is it that we can only truly care about what affects us directly? Can we really be reduced to that?

I want to believe I can be and do better than a self-centered jerk, blind to the hunger and pain of the strangers around me. I work actively to do better—to not forget that someone always has it worse. But even so, trapped in the cell of my own hyperconsciousness, devouring myself alive, I can’t escape the laws of the solitary ego.

The desperate urge to stop wanting—that, in itself, is just another want. The hunger for unnamed things, never had and lost—or forgotten. The craving to build real bridges of communication with the world, only to face the truth of a planet populated by a few golden hearts in an ocean of rot.

I try to tell myself that I can find my heart within the mess, but I see the weariness on my eyes and the bloody teeth collected on my hands. I have lived a lot for so little life. I have learned everything about survival except what to do after reaching the shelter. Tell me, what do I do with all this time? Can I do something with this mind? If you took my face in your hands, so warm and tender, I could not look into your eyes a single moment, but I would like to die right there, not live another minute, so as not to remember the moment when you let go.

I’ll never come back from this. I’ll feel alone and restless forever. Not even in your arms, not even in mine.