some men become their fathers. other become their bullies. some even become trees. but very few become themselves. when you are in a room with a hallways outside and the door open, the people walking by have only one face. they glance in as the pass by, grinning, scowling, lost in thought. my memories, my childhood memories of my father, are out in the hallways. their eyebrows are pulled down tight. they crackle with lightning. i waited years for him to walk through my door, for that man who is not only himself, but also me.
everything is wide open, a window through which to leap.
these earmuffs- they hide me from new york's mutters and from the boys watching my reflection in the subway window. today i met a man with no nose and only after he walked away did i see what wasn't there. he knocked on the bathroom door, apologizing when i turned the sign from occupied to vacant. he asked if he was allowed in and i beckoned him through. deep in my cocoa cappucino (say it out loud), wondering if his mind was all there, it struck me that his nose was gone as well and that they may have deserted him together, eloped, left him chunnering with one half of his face in a grin, the other half lonely. he had nothing left to fear, save the embarrassment of interrupting a half-naked girl taking a piss.
the beggars don't ask from their own. every eighth or so sunday, i lose, i lose my fear. by the next morning, it has crept back into my belly, shivering and pulsing, out of its coffin.
if i weren't a celebrity, i would be a teacher in a one room schoolhouse. the future is grey and green like that atlantic that spliced my life, but i'm waiting hand and foot on cherry season until she is ready to take flight. if i could, i would bind books; the thing that bores me most is a newborn. i love surprises, but seeing that i've believed a lie makes me cry. if i were in my mother's kitchen, i would feel safe enough to read this out loud to you. i want to be a prophet and invent the airplane; my heart is a fox and a box, a set of boxes like russian dolls. i am a pyramid. i dream of robins laying eggs, girls with my name, and forgetting the baby at the park. the homeless men raise her as their own. my first memory is of the cake at my sister's birth and her toothless state, but before that i was somewhere in the forest, listening to the rain.
fail fast, he said, fail fast.
