I’m browsing through a trauma forum when I should be asleep because
this is the path of least dramatic resistance, and so the most dramatic
fork to take. It’s so easy to eat an explosion. Much harder to-
There are whole threads devoted to journals of women
I’m browsing through a trauma forum
when I should have been cleaning my room
If I imagine my voice is a truckload of baby deer clown-catapulted
into a Somalian war zone, that might help me unwind a bit.
I’m so afraid of my own face I can’t
look in the mirror without mourning one thing or the other,
the fact that I didn’t shave this morning and went to work that way,
or the unbird-dusted, soot-sunk hollows of eyes I imagine I’ll see
in the doe-eyed face most patients find endearing
and which prompts spontaneous greetings of “buddy.”
The fact of my own voice is somehow so frightening
that I cannot recite a poem of my own despite reaching
higher than a mountain’s thinning scalp
(a windbreakered reference to my head)
to pat a patient’s head over a roach on a half-eaten pizza.
I guess what I’m trying to say, other than that you can speak up
in class and, 99% of the time, not look like you have that zit on your nose,
or are ‘that idiot,’ or have been living in a radioactive cloud which rears
it’s mud-face whenever you open your mouth, is that
99% of the time, you’re avoiding doing the laundry.
I’m browsing through a trauma forum when I should be going
to sleep, because there are so many right turns to take,
and so many corners to leave to the dark.
My brain just seems to steer into the path
Of flagellating pyrotechnics, among the most socially accepted forms of numbing
alongside alcohol, T.V, and casual sex,
{un}like the comedian from the show tonight
who my family called me in to watch because his show was about
depression, and was naked in endearingly ugly ways,
like casual sex rehearsed in a darkroom several times,
and half the time my mom was watching me.
99% of the time the person next to you is wondering if you’ll notice
there’s a zit on their cheek, or the muffin they ate that afternoon,
or the wear of their grandfather’s death
around the muscles of their mouth,
and half of the time the teacher is cracking a casual joke about how old he is
in the skillet to digest and conjure, in slightly different forms, in each successive class
as he wonders why he still goes through the motions, or the motions go through him.
It smooths the riverbed sometimes. I forgot what I was going to say,
which you can guarantee will happen in this story several times,
on which you’ll be presented with a lot of awkward whiteface.
It’s funny to me, looking back on the marl of these words, the extent
To which emotion creates supernovas, meteors mashing as meaning
In a lottery of maladaptive, malleable monsters. Swamps. To be. Drained.