Madness
It is not the good kind, but it’s also not what you think it is. You think.
Growing without influence in its own environment, it can be quite overstimulated
and hyperactive. If it flares up again, you might not make it out. Chip away
at its organic state created from mutations and mistakes and out of control manifestations.
Does it have its own beating heart?
How will you know? And when you know,
will there finally be silence and peace
in the knowing?
When it shows itself, it is coarse-haired, jagged, snaggled. Knotted up on top
and unseeing. A chipped tooth, one of two, jutting out of the wrong place.
What a faceless face! This is one of those that grows hair and teeth and maybe
mirrors the way you will look in the future. Look at it: see your future self.
Will there be more to come?
It senses you have succumbed, contorted like you are
in your wild shape. You were so close
this time. It wants you to know you almost made it out.
I am my own doomsday clock. It’s disruptive when some say I’m a smart girl
and a smart girl should be able to avoid this level of conflict, of catastrophe,
at every turn. What I did when I was told what to do; all will be well if only I
could follow the rules. Now it’s late, and, as usual, I don’t understand the assignment.
And there are things I should have done when I was on the very edge of annihilation,
waiting for the big threat to pass. It might be after the war, but I am still in the fog
looking for clear paths. When does my tour end so I can go home, turn it back. After all,
time is only a way of ticking past.
And if there is ever another morning, I will eat rationed butter pats on baskets of bread,
big bites of salty powdered eggs, also ersatz cream whipped with replacement oil
in strong bulletproof coffee. If I still like anything, I like to be under incredible duress,
then earn my small pleasures – be truly good and hungry – before I fill up to a full belly.
And a smart girl would know better than to exist as a terrible risk to all, I know. I should
be beyond full-scale plans, situation maps, a serious getting into it, with no reason for
anyone to panic. Whatever happens now will be a symbol of how I’m never quite sure
what to examine, how to comprehend the given guidelines, the go ahead, follow directions.
But I’m a smart girl -- so it goes – and there are things I should know. I still keep this
weapon tucked under my well-worn wings, in the waning minerals of my ribs, where the real danger lives. What I do know is all possible futures have been knocked down to the last:
we can’t take the world with us when we go. And I just want to take it with me when I go.
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