Of The Moon

Got a twenty percent on the last test, it’s almost nostalgia, that pre-college feeling of incredibly stupid, incredibly – a cloud, sinking and growing, of Miss Miserable and the full shadow quartet. Microbiology with this professor is strange and weighed down with tedium to the point of contemplating sharp corners,

I’m feverish again, falling up stairs. Seeing colors lit up in lights and circles around all our heads, our halos, our appetites in gold. All my faux-disease, my black magic, eyes changing color as a child for the man in the black coat. Again, I am constantly ravenous to raging, I want to be a butcher in a bloodied apron, I want a slab of meat in my arms and I want a knife and I want I want I want Instead of medical advice, the doctor gave me this last week: you are like a mythical creature.

Keep dreaming I’m growing scales, keep nightmaring and waking up crying, keep being wrestled away by a strong arm, by the memory of being held down, keep falling in starts to blood running down the sides of my face, I’m walking only in reverie and being taken over by an unreality, brought on by the small silences in day, the whisperings of dusk. (Sliver of moonbeam, glint and blood, and there’s no one left but Claire de Lune.)

Couldn’t sleep two nights ago, because of a dark spirit over the bed. Got out, and put more layers on, covering up all skin. Hot and scared, tangled and with a finger on the light-switch. Tapping on and off and on and off and I need to count everything in order before I sleep, I need to close all the doors, I need to I need to I need to, here, keep your everything inside while I split into two and with one of us, I hold your hand. I am smiling and I am not smiling. I am not sure which side of me is facing out.

I’m forgetting reasons for living and then I’m tangled up in him and breathing in a way that makes us crazy in pieces, in unavoidable fairytales, springing up, surprises behind closed doors, so I’m loopy, I broke open the 12-steps meeting with an unexpected storm. Where’s your higher power?

I’m encased with ghosts, I am feeling your future.

I am watching all the strangers on the train, I am thinking about the tightening of fingers around a neck. Googling symptoms and putting a finger on compassion fatigue. Ah.Thinking about that ex-lover on his motorbike now through Shanghai. Thinking about where all the others are too now, so far from my fingers and my lips, desperately wanting all of their stories within my grasp- wildly, selfishly daydreaming the peach, the softness of the skin between her shoulders, dreaming into reality, where I’m all caught up in bodies and I’m dreaming souls into them day into night into day where I am arriving in evening, I am arriving into a place where I am still scared of public transportation in the city because

(because, fuck, I still cannot think about it in a way that makes it real) but here I am, look, that’s fucking something, isn’t it!

I am here and myself and not a mountain, I am here and alive still, against all odds. Here alive, and covered in bruising, vast and purpling and I am swelling to cover all hurt, and I am putting the
middle child back to bed-rest, and I am dreaming of freak-shows, of accidents, of mistakes. Trains and falling, clementines and dimpled citrus making my skin smell sweet and good and eating an orange in class, breaking into it with my thumb, and that news article I shouldn’t have read as a child and all of those things I think about a lot, out of nowhere, because they are stupid and little and we cannot