Dancing Girl

I forget what I was thinking. Where’d that thought go, and the one before it?

The cuff of my left sleeve is unraveling.

I appear to be MIA.

The loneliness bites into my haunches, dragging me down backwards, gnawing out bits I think I once had.

I remember that much, this recycled feeling that never goes for good. It’s always right on the periphery, easy to ignore, until it lumbers to center stage, raises it trunk, then blasts away my other thoughts.

Goddamn elephant, leave already, go home, you have sucked all my peanuts and I have no more for you, ever.

I was thinking about contradictions. I was thinking about love, what it is, what it aint, what I pretend to feel, the selfishness of it all.

Damaged goods, not the marrying type, pipe organ on Xs, the unwanted babies screaming for milk or love or something else in the blue 1am shadows.

I was thinking of repetition, cycling on a path. Those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it, they say, but what about those who are hyper aware and doomed anyhow?

I am not comfortable here.

I am not comfortable anywhere.

Not in my own skin, which is another story entirely, it’s the brain that takes over.

That fucking elephant needs to go.

And since my words were stolen, I tried to think of new ones to describe the theft, but only get an image instead, the words not very good.

Sorta like a mushroom cloud, but not really like a mushroom cloud at all.

I become expansive, gigantic, my core sucking in on itself, knotting up and folding over while my brain rolls out, unstoppable, a cold front, or maybe warm, I can’t tell, and it keeps spreading out over the sky and there are no edges to it, no center, and that little part of me that is my body recoils and implodes but that mind part keeps expanding and growing and I don’t know where it comes from or how this happens to it or when it will stop, and it scares me.


And I try to grab the thoughts, unseen flies in a brown fog, and my hands grasp nothing again and again and I cry some, giving up, but not enough, the control is gone, and I think “not cut out to be one of the living” and those thoughts scare me or I think they should scare me, but they don’t, they calm me, the idea that there is always death behind the elephant that could sweep onstage and destroy the elephant and suck down my expanding mind and pinprick it to nothing.

And I was thinking about love and I was thinking of telling you I love you, but I didn’t know what it means, only that I feel like saying it, only that I feel compelled and muzzled, it would be the wrong thing or the right and I never know and C said I was selfish if I don’t and if I don’t I don’t and I think I don’t care if I do or not, I just like the words.

And I was smelling your shirt and thinking it’s not creepy or I don’t care if it is or not, and that boy keeps coming to mind and I try to shut him out while trying to remember when I was happy with him and what that was like and I try to envision the end of us now and whether it will hurt and how you don’t know the end is the end and that is all there ever is, but I don’t want to tell you that now because it will ruin the present and that boy is in my brain and I hurt for him because I hurt him and I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t look at him without hate and it wasn’t fair and I can handle Misery, but it’s a stranger to him and it makes him so uncomfortable to see me having coffee and cigarettes with a stranger, so I unbit my tongue and then I spread out more than I knew I would, and I blew around, grasping at trees limbs and traffic signs, and I tumbled and fell and somehow ended up here when I wanted to be somewhere else entirely, somewhere quiet and warm where I am not and am but there is no one there to know the difference, but that isn’t where I am at all, and sometimes I think I am happy.

But I don’t know how to be happy, and that boy, he accused me of finding something anything to feel bad about, and he’s a little right, but mostly wrong (it is his curse in more ways than this). I am not trying, it’s trying for me, I got this whole box of fear and memories, some call it baggage, and I don’t want it, and I threw it out the window somewhere in Ohio, but like Fido in Edwardsville, it found it’s way home, so I had to take it back and give it some milk and tell it I loved it and missed it and was so scared I’d never see it again, and I was lying and it knew, but didn’t care, it owns me, I’m the pet.

And I think I could be happy alone and I think I could be happy in love until I remember that I don’t know what it is and that valve is broken anyway and the surgery costs too much so it’s been broken for awhile and probably won’t ever be fixed.

Who have I loved that is dead and gone or not even dead, but I think of them that way, and sometimes I think I should get out while the getting is good and I think nice thoughts, but I already don’t. I sit in the yard eating dirt and worms and crying over every mean thing you ever said, things you don’t even remember because it was that easy for you and it’s never easy for me and you don’t understand and I don’t think you should anyway because if you did, you’d be more like me and less like you and I’m walking your way.

That elephant won’t let me work, but he’ll let me ramble and stutter. And me and my moods and not caring then fiercely wanting then falling over and expanding out and shrinking down and I’ve found my place and it’s comfortable enough except I can’t keep up no matter how many pellets they stick in my cage and I dance for the men and they clap and hoot but I fall over too fast then they kick me in my kidneys and call me a whore and I cry because I did my best.

I’m not what anyone really wanted.

It seems someone might be alive somewhere who wants this, but I’ve never found them and I think they might be dying or dead so I’ll never know. And if they did, I probably wouldn’t let them have it anyway. How dare they? The nerve.

I am bits and pieces and unfortunately shaped like peanuts and that elephant keeps running center stage and blowing his nose and doing the two-step then the shimmy and he’s got a cane and straw hat with red white and blue band and I say, “Go away, elephant, I don’t have any more peanuts for you, ever” but he only goes when he wants to.