Streetwise

[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.