The Champagne Soapbox

  • food

    I heard someone chew in the dark.

    At the movies – the one with the food –

    just me, them, someone else,

    all of us lit by a horror film.

    Their chewing pressed on one edge of me,

    like something might happen

    if they didn’t stop.

    I wished I could unhear them.

    I wondered what I sound like

    when my spit surrounds the elements,

    consuming in full.

    I imagined the slop they dropped,

    melting onto their shirt in the dark,

    their fork interrupting

    the quiet spaces between dialogue.

    Some part of me thought

    their mechanisms were communicating

    that they didn’t care for mine.

    Maybe I care too much –

    for mine, for theirs,

    for everything that stays inside

    the hand-drawn lines.

    Between open space of natural fullness.

    I bought salad dressing.

    Wanted to make it myself

    but couldn’t afford

    the anchovies or the effort

    the smashing of tinned fish into raw.

    Twisted the cap and it’s expired.

    Still poured it over random greens,

    ate the shelf-rotted food,

    drank from a glass with a straw,

    numbed myself with noise,

    listened to my own chewing

    in the small.

    Everything’s starting to feel gross.

    She had a tattoo that my boyfriend has.

    My smile made that baby dance.

    I feel stuck between my friends –

    I convince myself I’m moving through them,

    with them. And I am. I’m just overthinking.

    I heard someone chew.

    We cycle through people and things,

    digest what isn’t new

    but still meant for us.

    It feels like home to feel

    like I belong to nothing

    and everything.

    To sway between overanalyzing my body

    and noticing my face while I do it.

    To watch the way they look at me

    when I stir up some drama

    that’s nothing new.

    A worn-out plane seat.

    Stuffing luggage with what my paycheck can do.

    Maybe I’m not stuck.

    Maybe I’m just through.

    I keep forgetting my to-dos.

    Write them down, stare at them

    until my desires rot gray.

    My wants turn to goals;

    everything to do

    Suburbia feels the same as it used to.

    Park my dad’s bike, sway a fight

    Air feels a bit different, 

    each wind slap like my first bite. 

    Friction leads to creation or whatever.

    The increased normalcy.

    Submission to chaos, debt, a functional fallacy.

    The notes in my bedside drawer

    lists of things for other people

    I make lists for myself now too,

    that’s something new. 

  • crinkle toes

    My little trinkets and toys. We have a birthday and your wedding and some babies. We share the attention we once yearned for, until it reaches overseas. Until the fat man sings about how unlucky stardust could be sand for another rich man’s feet. Can mankind be resolved of egocentric immaturity? The gift of witness is protective from decomposition’s mystery.

    Stop motion claymations in rouge and puckered smiles. I put my fingers between the layers of tulle and scratch them together. Clacking wood toes on the ground, staring out at the staircase with eager eyes to blue eyeshadow and tights. Yellow chalk to grind the tops of your nails on. 

    I’ve tried not to outgrow the colors of my youth. 

    My closet looks like beige mush. 

    I’ve slicked back my hair so long that the edges don’t return. My cat and I shed the same out of hair. I shed so much hair and nails and emotion. The things I do and watch and endure for the betterment of soul. Eager to yearn betterment when all I’ve learned is earned. 

    Our cars become sunburned and healed. Peel at the skin of my lips and press rouge into my toughened maturity. Homogenized mush will be mushed so much that my moisture will wicker and my throat will produce the familiar booming laughter. An echo for, and my siren noise to call them back again.

    Holy love water soaking up the flick of your youth’s cigarette in spite of your purity. The candle hints over between the wall and I, white mush. Stickers in the grass, in between toes, pick apart by fingers and found in my hair. Just put on my jacket if you want the hug. Give it back to me when you’re done. 

  • soft animal

    I’ve been trying to write a poem like a tattoo. Ink on a pen. Underneath the skin. Except now it comes up my throat. I say words I could’ve never wrote because ink is forever and I shake stutter when I give speeches. Becoming more of a bitch lately. Young, fresh smelling leather. There’s a lot of empty space. And, I contemplate the difference in a circle and a hole. A lasso before it catches the animal, and what it looks like around something another something needed. 

    Needles, guns, grass. 

    Some important song.

    And, most of my words will pass. 

    The ones not written by tongue.

    My arthritic hands flip hymns from mass. 

    To do and not to say. 

    Slurring laughter with a meaningless hum. 

    Wake up asleep, just another day. 

    Believe the foggy lullaby that shares the tune of my future hand’s shakiness. The surrealist is opening his eyes. How can you be nostalgic for things your mind made up? Feel the eternity lineage women making up your fingerprints? Pushing each other for a chance to catch the light of your reflection. No phones until Friday, far from parents or road toll. A broken fresh individuality in independence, staring into the mirror for years picturing wire steel hairs red nails cigarettes accents curves like the ones you grew into. They thought of you, never knew you, “couldn’t be you” they moan and release between scrunching dirt between motionless toes. 

    That’s what they all say. The soft animal of our bodies when they become stray.

    I’m doing the same shit another day. The same shit stomping mommy come feed me again. Daddy I miss you again. Do you think of my voice when you want to be needed again? My room is red at night. I didn’t bite. My tongue is numb from cutting my teeth throughout the night. I’m doing the same shit yelling mommy don’t look at me again. Daddy do you see me? A sister is here and we love to play pretend. She lives alone now, we both do. Mend the urges while his forgiveness is true. Pray that when you get caught, the folds in your forehead wrinkles are warm and eyes you look into still seafoam.

  • stomach box

    Smell the dust of what I left. Lay my head. Recite echos of old insane melting the dark crevices of flesh brain. Pick apart the same ending from dead meaning. Same meaning to the dead end. Melting rain and embrace your never-end always going.

    Pre-meditated rehearsals of competency and my cat is scratching the gray walls like he’s found the princess blue beneath, the mint that once woken me. Stare into the lighter part of shadows and expect figures to come running after me.

    Find that under layers of paint, I’m made of projections. About thirty percent of those are white-gripped etchings of shit pre-teen poetry I wrote not expecting to be seen, except by my mother. 

    I could’ve been just thirteen. 

    Maybe twelve. 

    Smash my feet between the recycled mattress and painted yellow pine.

    In another world, I’m my own daughter. I don’t even recognize her. If I were her, I wouldn’t be me. Maybe similar tragedies. Sparkles and hurricanes. Smoke weed because it pisses his mom off but it’s fine now. We learned better. Punch the door behind me, when he was looking at me, still a few inches shorter than me. Still young, like now. Flapping hair slapping on the window, creased ponytail on the come down. Minor drunkenness, not the kind I learned. My sister cried because she didn’t recognize me. I test the drywall, and ask how to cry again?

    To be soft and defined again?

    You cracked your lips just to feel alone again?

    Tarnish my memory with provocativeness. More makeup, a push-up and a sports and a pinch and a cinch. Bounce and move, tumble and run. Gossip and text and smack, they’re having sex. Distaste for lunch. The mirror looks different. Streaking away from headlights on an abandoned road, dark of course. Secret footage, of course. There’s an innate swollen energy, a foreign body chewing on my inside. I ran, because it’s not the kind that’s learned. We kind of just do. I wear silver.

    I don’t know what to do with my hands anymore. My feet feel too free. Wiggled toes to find a grip on the leather curved seat. See my digits and their stick on the dashboard glass plastic. Comfort is temporary, it’s all overcoming. Eat it to release.

    I want to change. I want to grow. It’s impossible not to question what I know, the things I want but never fully get, seek attention until it’s critical. I lose myself and find her when I finally let ego go. A different sort of glow coming from the shadows when hiding below.

    What if it was all my fault?

    What if I drove you to it?

    I’m guilty, aren’t you?

    I look so much like my mother. 

    I absorb people’s hardness. I wake up greasy. I’m not nice to myself, the plush femininity my soul finds easy to give to mouths with rotten breath. The smoothness of innocence, all that I have learned and figuring out what’s left. I forget to breathe when I run. It’s never been this easy before.

    Grind my mouth bones for hours, swallowing their dust. Gather the dust and fold them into a pretty stomach box.

  • sure

    Sure, I have time. I always have time for you. Sure, whatever you need. Whatever you need. 

    What do you need? Should I pack extra in case you don’t bring what you need? It’s hard for me to grasp I’m all you need. My smile you found between carnivorous testosterone and chemical weed. The inside of my gnawed lips slide against rugged teeth, the ones marked between not eating clean and biting nails. When my smile feels weak. What parts of my mind can you only see?

    I can be what you need. Sure, I become someone better for you to perceive. Not that you need it, that’s not what I mean. Give you a chance to rediscover between the necessary medicinal estrogen and books I ordered but never read. Patti Smith on my Night Stand with a rusting earmark between written crises and chicken-scratch on Ch. 13. I told you I wanted to disappear when I didn’t feel seen.

    Your smile fits into my neck, like, so many liquids filling cracks between ice and mixed hormones and screaming men at the ringing bar scene. I’m shorter than everyone else. How I absorb energy. How tall I grow to reach above beaten ego and pseudo-personality. How I felt, and become someone else. He always sees.

    Remind me of how to be. Sure, whatever I need. Let’s melt into REM pheromones and recite scenes my premature dreams begged me to complete. We start a movie and fall asleep.

    I look at clouds from both sides now. Up and down, cloudy visions I that vaguely recall. It hasn’t rained much at all this fall. The more I think, I don’t really know clouds at all. 

    Junebugs and mosquitoes and flies my cat chase. The dizzy dancing way that we feel when dreams become real. First time seeing snow as if it were on a beach. It disappears like an empty plate after a big meal. I forgot how skinny felt.

    Happy tears but looking around slows them down. I smile and frown, seconds between the same emotion, a different clown. I turned 25 wearing a princess crown. An easy rhyme to find what was never around, when I was little, when I was 13. Sneaking words and stuffing them between the mattress and sheets. I wrote to her while meeting the future, acting like the future was mine to predict when I still sat with crossed feet. I still do.

    Now friends are acting strange. They shake their head and mention that I changed. Look around and believe everything isn’t the same. Clouds in the way, releasing the rare rain. I’m always in the way, releasing words that all mean the same. Just like now, you reading this. Sure, whatever I need to make my thoughts feel less than insane. Felt the rain split my skin and they wonder how my brain translates simple pleasure with grain. 

    It’s just a day, and the next. 

    I won’t always feel the best. 

    Be your best. My best.

    2AM, learning how to invest. 

    Use the airport to leave and come home. 

    Live by the airport, watch the people leave and make it home.

    Hope that the pilot gets some rest. 

  • duck pond

    The sweet in-between. My ghost succumbs the spiritual machine that supports both forward time and the traveling me. Life is losing the idealized time only to find a newer sense of keeping a winning score. It evens out, in-between the end and what’s more.

    Nothing’s gonna change my world.

    Nothing’s gonna change my world.

    Thoughts meander like restless wind inside a letterbox. They tumble blindly and collapse into each other still moving in-out-through chewy idea noodles, store bought sauce.

    Dried grass and tangled hair, both doors for the universal exhale. I turned the single-ply page and found greasy fingerprints through the thick layer of dust. I wake up falling asleep to his yesterday musk. Count his moles until the clouds wither and gently reveal dusk.

    I notice myself more when I’m just a person on a crowded street. Strangers behind tree trunks with prowling curiosity toward the beat of my slapping feet. Most of the time, it was time that I spent just thinking about me. Across the universe, there is an angel willing to live and die again to feel the hungry breath the mammals eat.

    There’s a man talking to himself on the street. He has clothes on and his haircut is clean. He passes by strangers that ask him for his food while he clocks his dry-cleaned-and-ironed pant crease. Most of the time, not all the time, a strict allotment of time is spent thinking about what other people perceive. Maybe because I do. All I do is think.

    Say thank you when the plate is balanced, when the fork scrapes the front of my teeth, when you’re aware of the flowers splitting the awkward space between you and me. The tasteless remain sit in the crack of the bones that want to be seen. I pick at the liminal noise, with my bitten nails, and wonder what other things you don’t want to tell me. Idleness directs sincerity, homemade sauce and dirty teeth.

    Something’s gonna change my world.

    Something’s gonna change my world.

    There’s a distant sound of a gun. A silvering son flipped the gold-rimmed eulogy pages. Careful handwriting, stone engraving. He would tell me stories about Alice jumping into the well. I want to fall asleep in the rain, just once, to see which (if any) part of me will rust. My steps are melting into the ground, and I wonder if this is the only way my words won’t wither and become rotten from worms and dust.

    I’m running and my eyes start to burn from sweat. I don’t run, I’m not the best. Pick at the eyelashes until the rooster had his sung his song from the chest. Not yet. I keep a jar of flies and watch the starven-one allow the full-one drain itself to death. I try to not be morbid, but my life is complete and I’m desperate to maintain the youthful mortality until my final unrelenting breath.

    A freckle on my foot, my neck. Between my chin and my lips, adjacent from my cheek. Someone missed. Ghostly lips once pressed, which is weird to think about the body I have and the bodies before who made my hair brown, eyes dark, and freckles blessed. Strange woman looking at herself undressed, impressed with how metamorphic love lingers. Greet the angels just to have them point out their past. So many mortal ones walk right past. I don’t notice.

    My aunt told me freckles were kisses from sun. I’ll look directly at the sky if it meant that my hazy fate is grossly polluted with passion. Sat there in a fluorescent bikini looking at the sky. I’ve practiced so much that I can float above the floor with glowing poise, allowing the world’s exhale push me into strangers on the street.

    Somebody’s gonna change my world.

    Somebody’s gonna change my world.

    Leather scars. I drive my car to the pond. Stare out into the dark, write words that might matter, probably not. Contemplate the marks my children might have and stain fresh paper with my depleting stardust. Throw thoughts into the letterbox. Allow them to purify while they tumble around, dodging strangers and allowing him to catch one (and read it) with his blood-blistered fingers.

  • pigs and parrots

    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.

  • ALICE IN CHAINS

    Are you ready for this life? Like tracing fingers on baby feet, you only notice emotions when you feel excitement or pain or certain specific things. Drunk breathing keeping you from going to sleep. Your body vibrates from the movement of your drumming heartbeat. Between the cities and thrills we keep cheap, something inside doesn’t rest. A social unrest: the collective understanding that when we lay for our final rest, the rest will watch us regress into the wet paved grass. They will see you at your worst and joke about death, but in death, we don’t see or think or joke at all. We just cease to exist.

    The last time I saw my dad smile was when he saw my sister and I argue. His brother loved sailing swamp water and shooting guns and Alice In Chains. I inherited more things than just my father’s pain. He lied about getting his tear ducts plugged. I tasted the cajun salt from my tears and saw my dad looking at me like a mirror with broken glass. Surrounded by strangers, it seemed as though he does not even recognize me when my water is not enough to warm my frozen expression. I learned to stop crying when he took my phone away, after my window was locked and the belt withered.

    Though a crowd of familiarity, I notice his red face and blue shirt and pale white skin stained with colorful emotion. The last time I saw my dad cry was the first time I saw him as someone other than my dad. Pictures of his childhood flipping over like a book on a screen. He got a new phone the other day and called me from it. The child now standing in front of me, pointing at me, telling strangers how proud he is to have made me and how sad it has been to lose you.

    At my new home, I walk around like there is a veil protecting me from maintaining peace. I feel people stare at me when I tell them where I have been. I’ve become accustomed to this sheet in front of me. I fucking hate therapy because i can’t tell people about myself, i just want them to see me without having to ask me about my favorite things. Have my friends wonder about me without having to ask them if they want to meet for coffee. It’s not their job to look after me. It’s my job now to work on getting me back to me after losing you.

    You haven’t talked to me in months, but your dad commented on his memorial page. I valued us, now the me after you. When I die, will you let me know on the internet?

    I’m starving but bloated from the sea I’m swallowing. She told me that my face looked really puffy, so I sat in the bathroom stall swallowing my own spit. I think I made myself sick from all this mucusy saliva succumbing to gravity when I cry prior to sleep. I went to the doctor, got a shot, and look at the bruise. Now I’m the sick one.

    My friends are sending me pictures of their babies. My dad is telling me he needs to pull himself together. My work expects me in the morning.

    It’s raining tonight. Tomorrow, sun.

    I lay in the pool with my pale skin and hairy legs. I realize how much effort it is. The sun reflects off me as though I have become water. The overcast afternoon: I have disappeared behind billowing blue waves and feel covered by the sheet in the sky. Doves fly around like angels, and peace becomes independent from my struggling white flag. I’m tired, so I close my eyes. Finally warm, you surround me like a plaid flannelled hug. Don’t make me think about how you became the light that clouds invade.

    I don’t look like myself, and you don’t either. I think of you and how I will always remember how you went to sleep forever. Play Alice in Chains until my restless sleep finally becomes a slumber. They’re playing some Cardi B or some shit by the pool. I can hope it’s just my beginning.

    Are you ready for this life? Tracing fingers on baby feet. Drunk panicking keeping you from going to sleep. Between the cities and tricks we keep cheap, some guttural growl reveals that it can’t go to sleep. We all look up at the ceiling and wonder why the dead people inside painted it so cheap. In life, we joke about death. In death, we don’t see or think or joke at all, we just live in someone’s corrupted memory.

  • voyeur

    Dear voyeur,

    I think about looking through your windows, just to see if you clean your dishes when you come home or if you finish them after you sit-down to eat. If I think of you enough, would you think of me as more than just a memory? You keep our shallow time together as a reference for your deep fantasy. Something to replicate when the girl on the street looks a bit like me, someone a bit easier maybe. That’s not a bad thing by the way. I’m justtoohardonmyself for anything about me to be as simple as easy. I keep my place clean waiting for someone to come home just to make it dirty.

    At the right place and right time, I’ll gift you a peek.

    The person above me is moving out today. They would vacuum in the mornings and passivishly encourage me to get out of bed. My mom never rushed me to be up, so I roll around until someone expects me. The couple below me moved out too. I still make steps on the ball of my feet. I float around my apartment and to other people’s places like my laugh is an echo and my only question is “do i really exist to you” or are you just a fragment of my reflection. me, me, me.

    They’re as real as they want to be.

    Down the street, I’m considered the girl next door. On this train, I’m considered a girl who thinks of the whole world. I feel the car shake with the environment, and I think about how this life wasn’t free and the guy next to me might consider me to be a girl whose skin would look good by a pool. That’s not a bad thing by the way. I’m too hard on myself for anything about me to be free.

    Life can be easy when I allow it be.

    The clouds looked like mountains. She’s thunderstorms, coming from heaven and wrapping around you like a wet blanket. Slapping her feet on the ground allofasudden because she learned that no one listens to the sounds she makes. The people around her moved away.

    The clouds look like mountains. I feel like thunderstorms today, coming from hell and surrounding people with noise. I rumble words from my tongue and my stomach growls. People don’t expect me to snap, but I wake up in a pool of sweat and my bed on fire and I swim to the bottom of the flames and feel sad and happy at the same time that two opposites can coexist simultaneous to each other.

    The clouds looked like mountains. I feel electric today. I woke myself up in the middle of the night sweating. I looked at how skinny I was in the mirror and smiled. Desire’s baring teeth,bitingintome and it hurts buthesaid he was kindointo mesoiletitbelettheemotionsrevealthemself during my timeof the week – at least that’s what he thinks. What are you thinking my maybe baby? My neighbor hasn’t seen me lately. All of guys tell me lies I fantasize growing into a smaller waist size. I forget the last time i cried because it was unproductive and it lacked the structure of KPI’s.

    No one asks me what the weather is. I always ask the question and give the answer, and my friends listen to my noises and smile. I like to picture life from another person’s eyes. What they see when they fantasize, if they do – do they criticize myself in the same perspective as mine. Trees flow by I can’t ask why I don’t feel sad so I wonder why I consider old friends acquaintances and guys as a general disguise for why I feel like love is a prize.

    All I ever wanted

    was to do as i wanted.

    Maybe sometimes that means that i want to be wanted.

    After all that self-mercy its easy to love me so consider yourself lucky

    i’m going to let down my hair

    break things in here stomp around and scream in my under-

    wear opened the window and saw him across the street just to match me in my sneaky stare

    am i here or there do you hear me or do i just listen to myself scream at the walls and watch how my body moves in the reflection of my mirror?

    we both enjoy this carousel, fair enough going up and down between here nor there.

  • pink eye

    [subtitle: things i notice when i focus]

    It’s hard to fall asleep in a restful mundane when a screaming inner child hides behind these adult doors. I wake up in the middle of the night sometimes with my chest swollen with pain and throat scratchy sore. I’m on the second floor, downstairs exists two dogs a quiet girl and a smiling boy. Growing up, it was a quiet boy a smiling girl and a blondie with me on the other side of my door. I still fold my hands over my eyes and stare at the glow behind the window because the body keeps score there’s more to my morning than a husky howling at the goodbye moon and the slam of your neighbor’s heavy door. Payten was always up before me, anyway.

    Why does the sun go on shining?

    Why does the sea rush to the shore?

    Why do the birds go on singing?

    Going over another day’s morning, under a newish roof, surpassing an okay pay, licking against the grain of my ragged front tooth away. My dentist told me that I grind my teeth in my sleep, but really I just keep things in my mouth long enough that I can taste the color dye. Suck the flavor dry. New people watch my satiation’s demise and feel my eager heart rise. I text my dad once a week, but I… – fuck, I forgot to call when I said I would last night.

    A headache started, because I used to wake up to my mom coughing up pollution from downstairs. Four hours away, and I still imagine her voice so easily like it’s relevant to my subconscious memory. Maybe I’ll be like her one day, and maybe I am her just in a different way. She learned what is okay and her eyes ask for kindness when her words rough play. My parent’s mirror reflects my face. I get lost in this independent place hoping that I find peace in drowning mundanity and staring at dead flowers in my mother’s old vase. They wake up and think of me maybe when they brush their teeth, while I just think of myself and the chip that I made in a piece of my smile.

    My outfit is already paired together. I’ll change it to something not much better, knowing that the people who will perceive me today will label me with a Gen-Z header despite the fact I had donated that sticky college-aged pleather. I can do makeup under ten minutes now, because I care about skin care more now, maybe taking care of myself better now knowing that at least I’ll have depth to the lines from belly-ache smiles instead of frowns.

    I like my face. I like my body. I like this place. I step on a long checkered rug and crease my belly when I brush my teeth. I get a notification that his veterinary appointment is next week.

    The drive to the void is a release. Getting the giggles and screams out before the everyday abnormalities cease. Becoming focused is a feat under fluorescent lighting and cubicles that smell like stale coffee or Texas heat. It was more fun to focus when Adderall was freshly necessary.

    The coffee pot is cool. It has beans that shake and grind themselves for my pleasure. My co-worker told me his wife’s mother passed away. Her husband’s life was her and now without her, things remain the same unchanged. Still her on his mind at least. He tells me about his upcoming calls, and all I could think about was his father in law how he helped his faith and all but his mother in law who isn’t with us baselines his mind she’s a call he can’t make. The edge of my fingers throb raw after I used my teeth to razor them off in reaction for the things I had to say in passing hallway interactions. It was the most real conversation I’ve had between conversations of product passions and random numbers turned into fractions. I looked in the bathroom mirror because that frown did not feel natural at all. Did my tooth chip again?

    Us and them in equal opposition. A cross-stitched hem on pants I bought half off in college and an ink stain from when his golfing bored me. For a while, I could turn myself on for others, but it would make me feel off. Now I just feel on and run along, not for long until I stop and ask myself if anything is wrong. Nothing usually is, because I know myself now – (at least as much as I allow). I don’t really argue anymore. I run away, not for long until I stop and ask you if: “we can work it out together.” Since our problems are related and not new, something humane and an invisible line lassoing me into you. Snap out of it. One dry blink and I return to the Outlook blue.

    Routine malaise. A lump of normalcy drowns itself in the rusted tunnel of my throat. My voice leaves easily, not received as noticeably, like wind is a breeze and my words are just a breath to those who picture a version of me for their own pleasing. I don’t mean a lot of what I say, but when I think about it, I do and I downplay it too so we can reach complacent agreement or and agreeable longer conversation by an hour or two. It’s fine when you’re learning how to become an adult – deciding whether or not the communal design is meant to keep you sinking or filling you up with bloat. Or maybe I feel sick because I skipped breakfast. Or maybe I’m thinking too much about his dead mother in law. No, they don’t look at you and see your mom too.

    A new day decides on a new design, a deeper smile line. When I’m not at my desk, I’m at epoch with a dark-aura stranger and a shared power line. Through the casual phrases we intertwine, I cherish how my words are being heard from a new person in mind. A new girl decides to step in front of me in line it’s honestly bullshit but my coffee guy sneaks a smile through that invisible string we tied. I look at myself when I’m on camera just to wonder if the environment suits the wandering eye. My hair not tied, thicker liner on my eyes, are those glasses real or do you just like to lie? I like to think when I’m in public, someone is looking at me wondering if I met the right guy.

    When I think about the world in detail, what parts are real and what parts did I fantasize?

    I focus on today and notice the details about my life that are real and not romanticized.

    I don’t live a lie I guess I just see the world through a third eye. Through the mother of mine, she sees her daughter and sighs a sign of relief that I ended up with a life the sun favors frying. Through the strange power line, I touch my table neighbor’s hand and try not to smile. I wander into the record store next door and spend $50 on Elvis because my dad is always on my mind, just not at night. Turns out I’m fine.

    I just moved down toward the east of Austin. Driving down my new roads with my windows down is a sign of newfound peace. I feel a bit of release when the duties of my fiscal upkeep are temporarily complete. A restaurant receipt is breathing by the force of windows-down wind and my hair is tangled between sticky sunscreen and hormonal grease. I was so pissed off last weekend that all I saw my heartbeat, but now I’m going the speed limit and notice the letters to the exit for my street. Open my door and see my cat asleep, his lungs expanding and eyes open begging for me to give him something gross to eat. Stare at my tired self in the mirror and notice my mother’s crows feet from squinting from smiling at people I have yet to meet.

    Why does the sun go on shining?

    Why does the sea rush to the shore?

    Why do the birds go on singing?

    I am a horribly limited person who always wanted more. Lately, I’ve been trying to focus on the details rather than creating because I’m bored. I spend more time at the movie theatre than I do talking to the Lord. If indecision and reveries are the anesthetics of constructive action, why do I keep analyzing the folds of my brain instead of leaning on my pre-existing explorations? Force myself into a haze (or god forbid, I read a BOOK) in order to have a more informed opinion. I think when I think, I force myself to revive thoughts that were extinct, so much that I think that I think myself into a dark hole where my thoughts remain incomplete or indistinct.

    I pull out of the theatre and notice that the “O” in Alamo Drafthouse is slightly pink. The men on the exit of my street, who usually sell fruit, have gone home to their families and fell asleep. My cat noticed me turning my key and ran to meet me at my feet.