Work Text:
My new therapist told me that I don’t vocalize my feelings
not well enough not often enough and I guess it doesn’t count,
that time I shoved you face-first into the wall, scented you
and pinned you by your neck. You smelled like soap and cake
frosting and generic off-brand floral body wash. And I’m sorry
because I probably shouldn’t have done that nor shown up in your
bedroom in the middle of the night but I swallow those words
whenever they come up because you don’t want to hear them anyway.
Or maybe you do, I wouldn’t know, and maybe I should say them now
maybe I should’ve said them months ago, maybe you need to hear them,
even if it wouldn’t make things any better, maybe it just matters that I say them,
maybe it’s the principle of the thing. I wouldn’t know; I’m not as good as you.
(Not that anyone could be as good as you, but assuming someone could,
assuming they’d get halfway close, I wouldn’t be that person and I know it.)
So, here’s the situation: I’ve been gone for three weeks two days and fifteen hours.
I’ve tried to count the minutes too but my sister throws me off every time.
She says there’s no sense in keeping of track when these things don’t matter
anyway and I guess she’s probably right in some all things wither all things die way
where our lives entangle and we fuck things up and the house burns down with
everyone you love inside it, they all die charred and screaming and the universe
doesn’t even notice. if God sees anything we do, He never seems to mind, and
what’s the point in loving something impermanent someone else who could leave
someone else who could scar you bruise you put their fingerprints all across your
soul and then move on without a dent from you along their carapace.
I lost track of your scent as we moved southward. All the gasoline and motor oil
and sweaty angry people on Highway 1 overwhelmed me and I couldn’t pick
you out anymore. But still I wake up in the dank motel rooms and sniff at all the
stench of mildew sex and artificial lemon cleaners and I look for you. Every
morning, every single time, my chest aches when I never find you anywhere and
when I walk by bakeries, I don’t know why they don’t stink like flowers too, or why
the sea air along the coastline makes me feel so sick with lack when you’ve never
to my knowledge smelled like salt, at least not in that kind of way.
You are the peanut butter that makes my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth.
You are the novocaine that swells my lips and makes them refuse to move right.
You are the knot I can’t untie and can’t slice open and can’t solve in the slightest.
You are the wall that won’t come down for anybody, even when you think you might.
You are all of these things and none of them because none of them, not even when
they work in tandem, can really capture everything you are. But at least they make the
point well enough for now. Or maybe they don’t, I wouldn’t know. I think I failed
freshman English twice and you know that I’m no good with words.
Some scientists I read online said that everyone is made of stardust, that our
bones can withstand pressures that would turn coal into diamonds, that even your
uneven jawline is some kind of magic when you break things down and look at
them, really look at them as through a microscope. It’s supposed to be even truer
when you zoom the camera out: out of so many galaxies, so many planets, ours just
happened to support life, all the different combinations and recombinations, all the
choices by so many people that led to your parents finding each other, and out of
some billions and billions of potential individual creations, only one emerged,
against impossible odds without any chances in your favor. That’s you, a miracle.
The only miracle I’ve ever seen, but I think you’d probably tell me that you’re really
nothing special, that everyone exists against impossible odds, everyone’s a miracle.
That’s why you’re better than I could ever be and I accept that even when you don’t.
So, here’s the story: a monster wants to be the hero, a monster doesn’t want to
be alone, a monster’s always been a monster always stood outside and watched and
waited, always waited, for some villager with his torch and pitchfork to rally up a
gang of other people storm the burned out shell of an old house that no one ever
came to anyway because they can’t let the monster stay alive. And then a monster
meets a boy and he should be a monster too because he’s been bitten and they’re the
same, they’re brothers now, they need each other, but this boy saves princesses and
innocents and this boy stands between the monster and the wrong things he wants to
do and this boy has no idea what he’s doing but he smiles so wide and it makes the
monster sick because there’s never been anything so off-kilter beautiful in his life
before and this boy believes that the monster’s so much more than a destructive force
of nature in a black leather jacket, even though he has no reason to think this way.
And the boy believes, he doesn’t trust but he believes, and the monster makes a
quiet exit backstage left because the fact is that he’s killed people for all the wrong
reasons and he’s ruined people’s lives without even making his life any better and
he doesn’t want to let the boy know any more about this because just maybe selfishly
he likes it when the boy looks at him like there’s more to him than what he does.
Monster’s from the Anglo-Norman and the Middle French. I went to a library found
their Oxford English Dictionary with the tiny font you need a magnifying glass to read
and I looked this up so I could write this poem you’ll never read because my therapist
told me that I don’t vocalize my feelings and you don’t pick up the phone and anyway
I only get the nerve to call you when it’s three AM and I can’t sleep and everything’s too
still and quiet to be allowed. So monster comes from Middle French derived from some
classical Latin monstrum meaning portent prodigy monstrous act or wicked person
and maybe an atrocity. Disfigured and misshapen and not from nature, of great size and
ferocious in appearance, part animal part human. So I’m the monster but you already
knew that. You knew that when I threw back your inhaler. But maybe you’re a monster too
in the prodigious sense, I mean, extraordinary. You make me want to be a better man.