The Champagne Soapbox

My soul song is a parroted reprise. The ballad of bachelors is a scream of evolutionary thoughts demoralized by agency and enterprise.

Women can look through masculine eyes and hear concise images of the words they think. Nuns looked into my wide eyes and claimed my female agency was a gift for my husband to keep.

I prayed to the son for my soul to keep, for the chance that I passed in my sleep, I was deserted far from critical sins to reap. I pray that my daughters come to know their god outside acts of senseless violence or starvation from ignorance of urges they are guilty to feed.

A red gift ribbon stains my neck pink, begging to be unwrapped just so I can breathe. Men use their privileged hands because I have torn my nail-bed rough by sharpened jagged teeth.

Our suffocating is relieved by people who notice and become distracted by the sparkle in our cellophane. Maybe one day pleasure will not remind me of pain.

Bubble Bath and Funny Bunny blend together to make a soft pink. Things are always happening so my behavior is to just do without contemplating thoughts I think.

Melting in a sinking chair discussing the thoughts that I think with a shrink with a similar degree. What makes her so better than me, that she has the agency to tell me what my thoughts seem and ask me to let them be free?

A woman who once thought these thoughts were part of being woman and not being weak. Maybe they are not thoughts, but just intrusions that force themselves to be known for my survival. Maybe we are not just women but evolutionary connections that sing the parroted reprisal.

Water drips from the corner of his mouth like a carnivore. I tell him that I grew up on meat and cajun seasoning and men who look at me like meat. He liked the way my femininity maintains tender but masks indication of being weak. He smell the testosterone in my body when I defend myself sharply of the words that I speak. I never considered myself tough, but I make it difficult for him to tear me apart and game tastes good when the hunt is difficult to please.

We make the mistake of excusing pleasure as notion for potential peace.

A lot of men just want a boyfriend who has boobs, a competing masculinity. A cavity as a treat, from a treat. My feminine sweetness is a surprise after sleeping in shower water and waking up to dry deceit. Mistreatment is a condition of my inability to detect the ground beneath my painted feet. It was my fault, anyway, always. Women burned at the stake years after those very prayers were made.

For a life deserving of pleasure, a woman must restructure the idea of experiencing defeat. Silently, we must lose so many times in order to find ourselves otherwise lost but complete.

My baby curls faced mobile stars, dreaming of earning autonomy through just a few more years. Even that young, I understood that earning autonomy would be some man’s greatest fear. My tithe reduces with every independent year.

The more woman I become, the less ownership I have of the total sum; I tear through cellophane daily to compete with men about my percentage of the piece they take from you and me. 24-years old and I still use my teeth to rip the nail-bed away, partially clean but rough enough to repair next week. I have money to get my nails done in blend of different pinks.

Sharpen my sword to build a repertoire of weaponry to compete with exploitative masculinity. My first therapist knew what I meant when I told her that my boyfriend stole my femininity.

This guy just mentioned that the pattern of my sheets are interesting. He talked about my sheets like they were part of me, though only part of the time I spend in them sleeping. That when he pictures me, I’m wrapped in layers of cotton. An object wrapped in layers of linen or cotton or cellophane or ribbon. Look in his mind and find my bed before you find me.

A deer hanging by butcher’s twine, in a field otherwise utilized for nothing other than climaxing pleasurable satisfaction to their hunger.

I tell my dad casually about my fear of men I have yet to meet, men I have met, men that treat me like meat. He tells me men are pigs who squeal at the sight of someone curly and something pink. Having two girls meant a lifetime of protecting them from sexual profanity. Bound to suffering eternal through sins of our previous fathers, committed long before their conception though haunted for eternity.

I see him in the men I trust, who rebuild my idea of agency and challenge the boys who see my body as a vehicle for achieving egomaniacal prosperity.

I picture myself laying soundly with their salt tears falling from the gravity I never could meet. Not one neuron signaling to swish my painted toes to a masculine beat.

For once I won’t have a thought to think, only that I’m free from their thoughts. My shallow breath a sigh of relief when death is finally complete.

Allow breeze to be a notion of my gentle grief for our stolen agency and bodies known as just meat. Let my children notice my femininity as a weapon that tenderizes meat, that modern man can’t accept defeat and one day a man will come around to feel sensitive by my feminine beat.

The battle cry echoes a reprise of the women before me. Through hanging ribbons, I hear a suffocated plea for their forgiveness in freedom of speech. If it’s meant to be, then it will be. That I find so many living deaths in this life that each rebirth is a reminder that I actually am free.