Silver

I check my email 17 times a day, the five, six, and dash keys of my laptop are broken, I rarely pay attention, my body experiences sensations like an anemone. 

A couple days ago someone texted me that there is a praying mantis crouched inside of them. Once a day I notice a baseball sized rock crouched inside of me. 

Sometimes, at work, I go to the bathroom and make excruciating faces at the wall, open my mouth as big as possible, scrunch everything, curl my neck back and forth. I take my tips (doled out in cash) and buy ice cream sandwiches and beer at Derby Mart.

I feel serpentine and wicked moving through a crowd. 

I am noticeably bad at writing anything true. Thinking anything true. 

I am neurotic (at times) and completely exploding (at other times). 

The house is much too cold, the floors much too dirty, my circulation much too poor to play the piano. I have thought this for many years.

Tomorrow morning before noon I will play something new and shiny. I will grin grin grin, my teeth silverware, yes you can use them, yes I will wash them in the sink. 

I stare at videos and images and blinking lights and old photos of semi strangers and dig a deep hole and walk down into the hole and decide the hole is nice and not so bad maybe I’ll live there for a bit. 

I read palms and songs and weather patterns for proof, proof of something excellent and heartbreaking. 

I am an emotionally practical person.

Last night I dreamt of a symphony hall filled with dogs, silent.

I make vows of silence, usually on days like today where it rains sideways. I say nothing important, I listen to the rats fucking in my heater vent. I eavesdrop on all my roommates.

Later, I will wash my hands backwards and upside down. Take an asprin. Lay awake as silence pans through and around me.

I am a satellite dish on my bed, silver oh so silver

O Arthur O Arthur let down your hair O Jenny O Jenny play me a tune

Sitting back in this cavern I am the puniest acrobatic monkey in the troupe. I’m the wheezing whistling old accordion resting in the chair,,, pull me pull me! dear god do something!

I feel neither genuine nor vulgar, the rounded paper lantern diffusing the sparkly lightbulb.

I am only golden in the scrolls of the prince in the high tower

O arthur o Arthur let down your hair

I am only shining when perched on your flute

O Jenny o Jenny play me a tune

When I read aloud my story in April, most of them are on their laptops, looking at a vat of emails or playing sodoku or doing something important. I think about jellyfish in the waves, jellyfish caught dead and stranded on a shoreline, boys with buckteeth, fish with long hair and wings. When I read aloud my story in November I am crouched in some dripping corner of my brain, prodding at my budding wisdom teeth with my tongue. Taste of metal I bite the spoon the knife the fork the hand the denim fold of my pants at the kneecap. 

I think about punching someone in the face and how the phrase "punchable face" is violently insulting and how I wish I had an arm like Babe Ruth. I could punch you in the face and twist your ears back and forth! I want to make you a stew big and bubbling! Give you a strand of my hair and say "here, is this what you wished for?" Want to make something so beautiful and booming that it is undeniably so, undeniably beautiful and booming.

I turn east and let it flood my sockets

Green basins or marbles

I am rendered a (collapsible giraffe)

Everyone is listening to the trains version of ‘lovers rock’

The screeching pressure of it meeting the bay in the deep aquatic tunnel

Looking at pictures of people unfolding, hearing stories over and over, I feel like a bulldozer, or a construction crane, or the wing of a heron. I'd like to set this stuff in pudding or jello. Lemon lime, cherry, strawberry delight.