Sunday Confessionals : Secrets

Image found HERE

I have a confession, I am my mother’s daughter. I have a terrible temper and a tendency to be flaky and unreliable. For me love is an addiction, an obsession, a have to have. I am dramatic and childish in the best and worst possible ways. I am generous to a fault. I am afraid of my ambition, of earning money, of losing myself in a life without passion. I lack confidence and self-esteem. I don’t recognize my value. I feel guilty for everything and that makes me really hard to talk to. I cry easily and often and I don’t know if I am being manipulative or if I am just feeling vulnerable. I try to save people even at the expense of my own personal safety and well-being. I am hysterical. Open. Playful. Unstable. Innocent. I worry too much. I am aggressively protective. I can’t stand to see other people suffer, particularly children and animals. I am wise beyond my years. I am my mother’s counselor and also her mother. I am empathetic. I am my own worst nightmare. I complicate everything. I am gullible and adorable. I am competitive but I never win. I know what you want before you do. If you ask me a question I will bare my soul but I will never answer your question because I don’t know what I think or feel or who I am deep down. I accept everything, even the contradictions. I am psychopomp and a psychic. I exist more in dreams than in reality.

–

I am my father’s daughter. From him I learned that my value comes from outside of myself. Men are the ones who assign value and meaning to my life. My survival depends on my ability to accommodate and please my partner. I can’t live on my own. I am an object. I am fragile. I am defiant. I am an anarchist. I abhor mediocrity. I am paranoid and pessimistic and sometimes I compensate for feelings of unworthiness with excessive pride. I am a crippled genius. I am an unlocker of doors some of which ought to remain closed. I am an instigator. A Devil’s advocate. I will bring out the best and the worst in you. I am a recluse desperate for attention. I am possessive and jealous. I run wild. I like mysteries. I solve people like puzzles. I look in dark places. I am voracious and relentless. I am timid. I am a monster slayer. I am also a monster. I continue to gaslight myself and second guess all my choices. I am a failure. Not because of the mistakes I have made but because I give up before I even begin. Humiliation is the worst of all feelings. I am as big as a universe and as small as a seed. I have demon blood. I am more animal than man. I have an inferiorly complex as deep as the ocean. I am bottomless. I am terrified all the time. I don’t know how to be happy. I have an intensity which others find both alarming and alluring. I am both asexual and hyper-sexual and that’s probably a result of repeated sexual abuse which is to say I don’t know the true state of my sexuality. I am always fighting against myself, society, the man. For me surrender is synonymous with death. I am a revolutionary without a cause. I am a window painted over and nailed shut. I am black and white. I can smell blood in the water. I know your weaknesses. I see your strengths. My words are like razors. I am loved but I don’t know it. I make excuses. I brag. I have seen too much. I am scarred all the way through. I see man for what he is both good and bad. I don’t care if our beliefs differ. I am a drowning man. I have a head full of stories. I don’t know how to speak to people out loud. I say the wrong things. I am impulsive. I don’t hit children. I think animals are better people than people are.

Stolen 3 (again)

“Just look at the state of you…you’re absolutely filthy…” I looked but aside from a few flecks of dirt underneath my fingernails there was nothing about my current state that warranted my mother’s accusation.

At eight years old I was perfectly capable of giving myself a bath but I was no longer human in my mother’s eyes. I could tell by the ferocity of the steam that the water was too hot. My mother was generally a mild-mannered woman but parties made her hysterical. She loved nothing better than to plan events but she was unable to enjoy them knowing that in those few hours all of her efforts at perfection would be nullified. I climbed into the bath of my own accord knowing that my mother was too frail to lift me. I said nothing. I cried a little to myself but I was careful not to make a sound. She scrubbed my boiled flesh without sympathy but I knew that she did not hurt me intentionally.

“Don’t throw me away…” I whispered underneath the terry cloth towel. I wasn’t sure if I wanted her to hear me but presumably she did. She hugged me for a long time and it seemed to me the towel around my shoulders grew wetter. She didn’t make any promises but I felt reasonably certain that if she ever did it wouldn’t be entirely of her own volition.

I ate my oatmeal alone that morning. My father left early and my mother wouldn’t eat again for several days having been forced to eat a few mouthfuls of cake at the party. As soon as my mother began her chores I would go into the garden and retrieve my treasure. I had until lunch time to discover the location of the door but I did not need it because I already knew.

I rarely went into the basement. I wasn’t sure if the sterility of the space made it any less scary but it was at least inhospitable to vermin. I stood for a long time in front of the door debating whether or not I should open it. I knew the room inside had to be large because there was a good deal of unaccounted for space. I tried to remember if I’d ever been inside but it seemed unlikely given the volume of my restrictions. This was my father’s room. A room that he disappeared into for hours at a time. He hadn’t been down here for nearly two months.

My father was a surgeon and therefore like my mother in regards to hygiene and housekeeping. I unlocked the door and stepped inside. The room was full of bookshelves lined with medical texts. There was a desk much like the one my father had in his upstairs office and a chair that was identical. There was a journal on top of the desk that looked exactly like the one he’d given me for my birthday, a plain leather-bound volume with no lock. Inside of the journal my father had sketched, in excruciating detail, the internal structures of the human body. There were other sketches, close ups that made me feel incomprehensibly squeamish but I could not understand their content. None of the drawings had faces. I supposed the faces were irrelevant. None of the entries were of a personal nature and although there were a number of notations accompanying each meticulously rendered image they were of a purely scientific and impersonal character.

There was no surgical equipment or specimen jars. There were no pickled body parts or metal tables with restraints. I was both relieved and disappointed. I opened every drawer in my father’s desk. They were filled with identical journals, the sketches and notations meant very little to me but I studied them carefully just the same. I perused the bookshelves taking out books at random but they were similar in content to my father’s personal notebooks. I knew the proper names for the bones but only just and I often forgot the bones of the face. I did not yet know the names of all the muscles. I knew the basic function of the organs but very little of their failings.

I opened a large chest, inside were bones labeled in my father’s tight, Gothic script. I picked up the skull. I understood that it was real but I wasn’t frightened. Flesh was what made corpses scary, decomposition. These bones were all clean and only vaguely human to my mind. They seemed to belong to the same person as there were no duplicates and only one identification number on the lid of the chest. The chest beside it was different. The bones were smaller. I did not know if the bones were from a woman or an adolescent. The chest beside that one had a set of intact bones. The full skeleton of an infant. I did not dare remove them lest they come apart in my hands. The disproportionately large cranium seemed nearly as large as the skull in the first case, I was not sure that it belonged to the same body but my father did not make mistakes. There seemed to be other anomalies in the head but I could not identify the source of the deviations. The eye orbits were too narrow for the organs they were meant to contain. The arms were only rudimentary. Though only a small fleshless creature I found it repulsive, not even pitiable, just repulsive. The first two chests had been marked with numbers but this skeleton had a name “Elizabeth”. I closed the chest, heart writhing I glanced at the final chest but could not bring myself to open it.

 

Stolen 2 (again)

I had an inkling as to the location of the door but I would have to wait until my father was at work to begin my investigation. I left the library using an alternate exit to avoid confrontation. I would have to hide the key when time afforded but at the moment I had no alternative but to rejoin the celebration.

Dinner was painful. I watched my mother cut her food into progressively smaller pieces. She rearranged her food, now thoroughly dimensionless, into careful piles. She created illusions of absence. She ate nothing but air. My mother did most of the talking. She talked on behalf of everyone. I could feel her voice tearing at the back of my throat every time I opened my mouth. I could feel her eyes in my skull, like two hooks. ‘Shut up. Shut up. You’ll ruin everything.’ She spoke to me with her hands. She tugged my sleeve under the table. I spoke only when addressed. I spoke in monosyllables and euphemisms. After dinner there was a short recess. I spent my recess in the shadow of my classmates. “Your mother is very thin. Is she sick?” One of the girls remarked off-handedly. “Oh no, she just can’t put on weight. She has a high…” I trailed off a high what? What was I meant to say? The girl waited impatiently. “Standard…” I had heard the words high and standard linked frequently in conversation.

“Well alright then…” The girl shrugged. She didn’t care enough to press me. I searched my mind in vain for the word.

//

When I entered the kitchen I could tell by my mother’s expression that she had noted, if only just, my presence. Her hand alighted on my shoulder like a frightened bird and she took, what I imagined was, the last breath of the evening. I had prepared an excuse for my unexpected intrusion but it proved unnecessary.

“There you are Eli! Come now it’s time to cut the cake…” She maneuvered me toward the large banquet table in the center of the dining hall. She had tears in her voice.

There were three cakes, one vanilla, one strawberry, and one chocolate presented precisely in that order. It had been determined, after much consideration, that vanilla was my favorite. Strawberry suggested vanity. Chocolate suggested avarice. Vanilla was prudent and therefore the only acceptable choice, I would not even be permitted to sample the other flavors.  If it really was that easy to alter a man’s nature then why hadn’t my parents taken more care with their own diets? Why did my father drink? Why did my mother refuse to eat?

My mother pressed the handle of the knife into my outstretched hand, but she was not permitted to guide the blade. I watched her take her seat, her knitted brows drawing out the terror in her smile. For this occasion I was permitted to sit at the head of the table, a designation I neither deserved nor desired. The guests, which existed purely for their own benefit, appeared sewn into their chairs. I stood motionless above the cake. The cake might well have been a body of flesh and blood and I might well have been a recruit in service to an unprincipled war. I swallowed but the lump in my throat could not be dislodged. “Well don’t just stand there Elijah.” My father barked. I slid the blade shakily through the cake. When it was my mother’s turn, I watched her delicately shave away a slice. Paper-thin. Borderline transparent.

///

I buried the key beneath my mother’s favorite rose bush. She was in the kitchen, embroiled in a war which offered no hope of formal resolution. She would scrub each dish until her fingers were raw from heat and persistence. Once clean she would drop them into the trash one by one, like the shells of discarded eggs. No one dared intercept her pathos and no one dared name it but the cause was obvious. My father retired to his study, drink in hand, he would not speak again until breakfast.

I had been careful not to kneel in the dirt and with my sleeves rolled up past the elbows I believed myself impervious to filth. Against my naked forearms the air was as sharp as a briefly applied cigarette. Not for an external chill but such was the shock of my violation. I had wanted for very little in my short life and had asked for far less but this key held the culmination of all those secret leanings. I patted the earth carefully knowing that my mother would detect the slightest disturbance. If she were for some reason vexed by the sight of the topsoil she might extract the entire plant. The thought that she could kill something she loved to appease her illness frightened me and though I’d never voiced my fear I often worried that my own eccentricities might invite a similar fate.

Stolen 1 (again)

(This is a story I started writing some months ago. I posted several sections. I am working on it again trying to flesh it out. Trying to make sense of it all.)

The abyss exists within each of us, though it is perhaps more commonly referred to as ego. I is hungry. I is the reason that absence is so heavy. Some would make of their absences a grave, others would fill them by whatever means necessary. I am guilty of both. It is true what they say about regret. I regret most the atrophy of my heart through omission. I should have been more honest with my feelings, a man can’t live on justifications alone.

 

All memories are subject to embellishment and decay. Do not expect my story to adhere to chronology as you may be given to understand it. I write as though insane, I write as my memories surface. Do not take my words for truth. My words reflect only my interpretation of events. There are those that would silence me/challenge me but they are dead now. Literally. Figuratively. My wounds are deep, my judgments biased. What I am about to tell you won’t make any sense and if it does make sense then you have my deepest condolences.

//

My 8th birthday was more facade than celebration. A bit of posturing for my mother’s sake, as she had so little else besides. The children from my class were all invited but it was not for my company that they came. They came because their parents willed it. My father was a respected member of the community. He wasn’t simply a doctor, he was the only doctor for miles. He was an unpleasant man behind closed doors but faced with an audience he was intolerable. I knew the jest of his portrayal. My father held society in the highest contempt. He played the game but only because it forced others to acknowledge his superiority. I understood, to some degree, his false participation. I was accustomed to it but I did not care for either version and feared them both equally.

 

My social ineptitude was considered a betrayal to my parents who took great pains to secure their reputation. They spared me public humiliation but this omission in discipline was not out of consideration for my blighted ego. They simply did not want to draw attention to their own failings.

 

My classmates did not attempt to engage me in play during the party or afterwards. They saw me only as a repository for gifts. Their gifts were impersonal and superfluous. I opened them with a smile so tight that I felt my jaw would weld itself shut from friction. I did not seek their friendship. I was content to speculate at their games and the conversations of the adults meandering mindlessly around the room but all the while I was alone.

 

The room was not dressed for my benefit. There were decorations but they might as well have been stars. They hung fragile and out of reach. My mother too was like a star. Beautiful. Distant. Dead. Her cold fingers dug into my arm as she paraded me around the room. Every now and then she stopped to tidy my hair or to straighten my clothes. “Oh Eli please don’t wrinkle your suit.”. “Keep your hands out of your hair…you’ll ruin it.”. “Why are your hands sticky? The candy is for the guests. I hope no one saw you eating. Please tell me you were discreet?” Her eyes burned the top of my forehead. My mother went to great pains to avoid my eye contact.

“No one saw me Mummy.” I lied. Even had I been able to define discreet, the concept of discretion was beyond my comprehension.

“Well thank God for that…dinner will be served at 19:00 please try to be patient.” I nodded. My stomach growled. My mother blanched and then gathered herself together. “When we are finished greeting the guests I’ll give you an apple. If you promise to stay out of the way.” She started to tug my arm but I remained fixed. My face began to contort. I wanted to cry. None of the guests had shown the slightest interest or consideration for me. Wasn’t this my party? Wasn’t I meant to feel special? What I felt in actuality was shame. Shame for getting in the way. Shame at the notion that my party would be ruined if I was “seen” by the guests after its official commencement. I thought for a long time with my face screwed up. I didn’t cry. My features relaxed. My mother took a breath so deep it looked like she was having a seizure.

“You won’t even know I am here.” My smile wobbled a little before falling.

“That’s a good boy…” My mom shoved me in front of the next visitor. I shook his hand as I had been taught but I had to look to my mother for the words. I had forgotten what it was I was supposed to say. My mother mouthed the words to me. I decided to ad lib. “My name is Elijah.” I leaned in, the old man stooped. “I’m not supposed to be here.” I told him matter-of-factly. The man pushed a gift into my hands. “I won’t tell anyone that I’ve seen you then.” He assured me in confidence. He greeted my mother coldly and something in his coldness warmed my heart.

 

I do not know when I retreated to the library but it was not conscious insubordination as so little of what I did at that age was premeditated. To be the guest of honor in a room full of strangers was a loneliness more imposing to me than my own volitional exile. I took out a leather-bound volume at random. I had my own books but I had read them all and worn them bare in repetition. The library was locked, save for when we had company, and this had been my only occasion to enter for several months. During parties I often came in secret but to come here during my own party, where my attendance was mandatory/albeit pointlessly passive, went beyond risk. Taking a seat I opened the book in the middle expecting to find only words as my father did not care for fanciful stories. What I found instead was a compartment and in that compartment there was a large, brass key in a style that was faintly familiar. I placed the key in my trouser pocket and closed the book returning it hastily to the shelf. I could not risk being discovered, to be discovered now would deprive me of a singular opportunity. I was going to have an adventure, there could be no better gift. The sound of footsteps set me blindly into motion.

Tale Weaver – #256 – Trigger – January 2nd.

If I were to raise my voice
your fragile heart would shatter
and tear crescents into the soles of our feet.
We are actors of necessity.
Our words are cold and diaphanous
like an angel’s wings before death.

My unsmiling mouth
fills your body with contempt.
Each time I approach your borders
it is taken as a boast of enmity.
Blood makes it personal but bridges
require substance and substantiation.

If I were to open my hands
my heart would weep itself dry.
You love the idea of love,
the ideal of mother and daughter.
My pain brightens your halo:
my pain looks better on you
than it does on me.

Writing Prompt #200 “Special Collage and A World Apart 7″

Nobody chooses obedience.
–
I once lived two stories
below the nearest window.
The statue of a child,
invisible and obliged.
–
I was once a soldier
in the guise of war
my heart a patina
of inscrutable remorse.
–
Love was complicit with torture,
a room with drawn curtains
and savage underground stars.
–
I never forgave my body
the fatality of innocence
nor my ego its mechanizations.
–
There was never any goodness in me
only a sinister need to perfect
my most trivial misgivings.
Despite my scars I am only broken.
–
I have all the ingredients
I’ll ever need to develop
but still I wait ripping
myself to pieces one
receipt at a time.
–
Once the sun was sharp and sweet
an orange, a phoenix revisiting
what time-in his infinite necessity-
felt fit to ravage and with each new age
I pass wordlessly through a fusillade of echoes.

–

I have so many prompts to catch up on. I must apologize for my negligence. I have obsessive tendencies and when I get fixated on something I find it very hard to shift gears. I eat, breath, sleep a thing. I am not finished with my project but hopefully I am at the point where I can come up for air. I am not entirely sure though!

Poetry Prompt 27 – Whimsical

A blood orange sun parses mischievous clouds

From the quaint to the curious, we rally

In rows of two with plaited fists and quizzical smiles.

Landscapes slide underneath our Mary Janes

Some real, some imagined but each

With a particular nuance and scent.

A waggish smile compliments your skewered brow

And in being young I am inclined to believe.

–

A swollen apple lopes across an unkempt yard.

Chameleon, liar, mendicant I weave stories

From luxuries both sought and endured.

I traverse stories wrapped in skeins of flesh.

The child in me is no longer whimsical

But once she was and in my memories

I sometimes return to her makeshift dreams,

To her hopes uncluttered by impossibles.

My normality burns, the cocked smile

Churning moonlight into honey.

I face my delirium and she faces me.

–

I take you in doses, sugar, analgesic.

Wherever you walk the ground opens

And drinks of my sorrow, planting flowers

Where there was only dirt and manure.

There is always you, always love,

Always the impulse to riffle

Through my belongings and pass them on,

Discrete treasures dipped in metaphors and blood.

Wordle #122

I am a thousand needles

Persuaded by degrees.

Dishonesty is my tribute

To years nestled naked

Between the floorboards.

–

My visions stem

From intrusions

Of the heart.

I have come

To expect violence,

Periods of fear

In which not but dreams

Can survive.

–

If I stay “I” will perish

And “We” will rise

Hundreds of unfinished faces

There can be no space

For forgiveness,

No allowances

For your perversions

If I am to live

And I will live.

Writing Prompt #118 “Collage 3″

I am given to certain

Eccentricities of gravity,

A pull toward expired luminaries

Toward pocket watches

And sepia-toned reliquaries.

An odyssey unto myself,

I sit aside my bike,

My legs, my arms,

All things mechanical

For the freedom of

Puffed dandelions and dreams.

I spin flowers from regolith

And mammoth bones,

Clouds tucked behind

My ear in place of coins.

I seep into hidden passages,

Into nooks both real and rehearsed,

A Cesarean scar,

A ray of sunshine,

A bucket of rainwater

Gathered accidentally in the shriek

Of an impromptu storm.

For

https://mindlovemiserysmenagerie.wordpress.com/2015/08/02/writing-prompt-118-collage-3%E2%80%B3/

Photo Challenge #65 and Wordle #167 “Runaway”

Zwobel

Her unseamed flesh suggests neither

Fall nor insurgence but a sorrow

More prolific and pandemic than grain.

–

The dirty halo of her ancestors afflicts

Not through acquisition but through attachment.

A slavering of words unfit for a child’s ear,

A slavering of fists unfit for a child’s possession.

–

They’ve pierced her heart, worms

In the apple of eyes too blind to glint.

A key scratching door after door

In hopes of reconciling the fit.

–

There are no players in this game

No levels and no present moments

Worth the labor of acquisition.

–

Her mind approaches the air

Drinking in each passage, each tornado

As if it were a fever, a phase

In the consistency of consciousness.

–

Her red shoes splinter the ground

On which they rest, the unseen dervish

The mangled bike in search of vagrancy.

–

Her dress woven of snow-white cotton

Does not chance upon the sun

But on the slow and singular articulations

Of a moon half-risen and slightly strained.

*

For

https://mindlovemiserysmenagerie.wordpress.com/2015/06/16/photo-challenge-65-sadness-june-16-2015/