not a poem, though much the same
My hair began graying in small patches in the seventh grade so I know a thing or two about hardship. I was outfitted with an orange reflective vest and clipboard during the fire drill at work so I know a thing or two about pain. Still I can buy film cameras or men’s lightweight jackets on Ebay and in the morning almost before I know I’ve woken I have pressed my face in my girlfriend’s neck and the whole of me slots into place with the lot of her and we are one being together until the lights go on.
Do you want to glow and burn? Should I have skin made from glass? I could wash it with milk, brush it with a blade so small it makes you cry it would make me cry like I cry watching this woman scoop kittens out of car engines on Instagram. They’re incredibly frail and soft just like my face before we fix it. I have always felt a pleasing ache in my solar plexus over objects in miniature. Aged seven and at sea, once, knees in the mud and otherwise having crawled deep into my own mind I lost a load of tiny figures—mama, papa, brother, sister, baby, dog, woman doctor and dinosaur—to a tide that rose at my back before I’d noticed it and they were plastic and I sobbed. For all my vanity I know almost nothing about how one can become more beautiful and maybe unfortunately I have worn this at times like a point of pride. There was a time I wanted to fit in the palm of my own hand. Now I want to buy a lotion that makes me angelic and to never die. I would settle for highlighter though I don’t know how to use highlighter and I guess I don’t mind dying I just worry that after that I’ll be bored. And, you know, it’s not that I think looking good is so important. But I haven’t figured out a method to improve my personality that makes as big of a difference as covering my grays with box dye from CVS
A childhood friend had a thin, mean cat named Dizzy which would scratch us while we slept on the rug in her basement in a graveyard of mini Doritos bags and J-14 magazines with faces cut out. But I liked that cat and I cried when he found a forgotten corner of a linen closet to lie in and die. A childhood friend spending time at the playground just talking in circles in soccer shorts rolled up because we thought we were too old to climb lost two new adult teeth when the wooden seat of the seesaw being bounced by a boy—who unrelatedly is dead now—caught the bottom of her chin and quieted her mid-sentence then until the screening. A child, ten, I hit a boy in the forehead with a street hockey stick one afternoon. It was one of those perfect fall days that never come in California. A feeling of unending vigor radiates, and leaves make smears of orange and yellow as if the world becomes a painting at the edges of your vision. Evening crept at us but there was sun still on the driveway where I let the stick clatter and in that sun it shined almost rudely and I kicked it away. The boy gasped and his lower lip hung heavy as near the hairline a second mouth fell open almost prettily and then everywhere was red. He would need stitches but he was routinely cruel to my brother and by the weekend when I hadn’t apologized he came by anyway wanting to ride bikes. There were fish sticks for dinner that night and though I thought of the blood as I pushed a freezer fry through a mound of ketchup on my plate I wasn’t sorry and it tasted just right.
I wish I liked the white on my head but I don’t. It would be lovely to care not at all for expensive tinctures with demoralizingly cute names but I do because I want to think my face is as radiant on its own as it was meant to be but I am selfish and hopeful and I don’t. Last time I tweeted about Padma Lakshmi, making what I thought was a gentle, loving jest about the legality of a ceremony in which she married something like twenty or one hundred gay couples at one time, she thought I was a homophobe and quote tweeted to defend the honor of same-sex marriage so I obviously won’t attempt to make contact with her now (to be clear I was not trying to make contact with her the first time because it is not the place of the common, filthy man, I think, ever to be so boorish as to “at” someone as infamously beautiful and majestically cutting as Padma Lakshmi) about these vacation braids she wore during the finale of Top Chef season fourteen we did scream and cover our eyes, inch worming happily on the couch like at a really playful gory film just from surprise. Gay people getting married to each other in California or elsewhere isn’t a problem to me just so you all know. I’m even attending one such homosexual ceremony next week! And so circling back to the question of the highlighter???? Can anyone explain????? No, never mind, really. I’ll buy seven perfume samples on the Internet and reread some Shirley Jackson at my desk at work and sleep nine hours a night curled by my girl and all the time dreaming about a two-story duplex apartment I lived in when I was nine, the interior of which represents, in my mind’s eye, the physical landscape of most imagined places, many homes in novels, and in particular Bella Swan’s dad’s house and all of this perhaps will create a sparkle about me that if it cannot impress will at the very least unnerve.