[002. Red] [Picture # 4]



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My bones, you see, are in far worse condition than 

even the most brittle woman of sixty-five who,

if she fell down the stairs

(thump, thump, thump

like rap blared out of car radios with the bass

turned up so loud that my eardrums fracture into a thousand

flies.) would break her hip in four, five different places.



Far worse.



Also, I've come to realize that I'm nothing more than

a whale wearing a whole sky-full of eighty-six story carbuncles like

beauty marks on my back. 

These parasites make my complexion all rough and gritty

like the calloused hands of Mexican circuit workers.

The parking lots of my heart have been all crowded up

with indistinct feelings of 

schizophrenia and – 

can

you

hearthemthevoices?

Voices that crawl up and down my body 

like wounded soldiers pulling themselves forward on their

bellies through Vietnamese long grass

that hide little children of insanity, hide them like

crackerjack prizes.



It's like,

like I've got my ear held up to every doorway in

the world and I can hear every conversation in

the world. I can hear her getting beaten and growing

whiskey-colored bruises beneath her eyes. I can hear him

reading bedtime stories and I can hear them breaking the bed frame

in the apartment above me.



I have all this light leaking from under my skirt

like the glow leaking from under the bed sheets of little boys

reading after hours with flashlights. I have

all this fear huddled in my corners

(don't cry. I'm here, I'm here)

and 

I also have all this hope 

tucked away like quarters and dimes in a shatter-proof piggy bank

to buy rain-dances from the medicine man down the street 

to heal my breaking bones.