A dream within a dream. The theatre of my consciousness. A me, hallucinating me, drawing me in window marker on the bathroom mirror—that is all the me I'll ever be, figures changing with diet, sometimes a stringier me than usual, sometimes fatter, tireder, more tender, more or less hunched, as my father says gaunt, hair mussed, eyes like Manson. Totally in control, necklace of Spree, original Game Boy code sequence tattooed below my button: up up down down left right left right B A start. Touch to play—select start if you want two player. Sea men bristling my nipples. Behind a broken window Matthew Broderick thumbs the nuclear launch codes. I keep a towel and a beach chair under my bed for the day it happens—I'll be sipping a Sprite holding hands with the alien sons and daughters of the revolution, writing #sixwords in blood on our arms. I was a girl on grandmother's bed. You and I shared a religion class. And instead of doing our project we laid on my grandmother's bed I told you how my mother was conceived in this bed and you took the bait, unzipping my school uniform (I always wore the pants) playing my vulva with your cock, rubbing my clit a velvet coin purse messing around with my pee hole a bit and finally finding me with your blessed dick hole, sticking it in and I didn't mind a bit that we only got a B- on our project. I wanted a fetus in me that day, each day, every day since I learned of my baby box and every egg I'd ever spin was with me when I spouted from my mother's hole. I am a hole, ever empty, something to fill, a lack, a potential, a place to hide. The essence of an innie/outie. Your teddy bear. Something about me looks like a daughter looks like a mother to you. Somewhere to put your sticks and rods and guns and pricks and fingers and tongue and toes. We get freaky behind closed doors. Order breast pumps from the internet. Watch a dying breed of compulsory sex and feeling—future holds no love for these and flying objects land on my roof seeking to reach themselves in the past, to learn our own essence, always a mystery to the intuitive. Blankets us with bomb, with carpet, with dizzy spells automatic sleep sudden combustion and naive head replacement. There is a descendant of mine looks like a marsupial rod, she has eyes of a tree frog, maybe, or a sentient raccoon. The baby community will never embrace me—I am neither fashionable nor legal nor egomaniacal enough to be a surrogate god. I make myself a sacrifice, doubled over painful with a hedge trimmer sticking out my belly, playing Operation working out the kinks in all my tubes. You're licking my vagonomics trying to stimulate me for the big event but hand me my glasses I can't see through this spray.
The surgeon of this surrogate head.
And what I have to tell you isn't pleasant—what I have said even less so. "More matter, with less art," says Gertrude. But I swear I use no art at all. If I have used a complex style seeming of nonsense it is because I found a need to gate off various readers, potential readers, and their company and kin, a ratings guide intrinsically, built to the text itself, such that a sentence and a word will mean exactly what each listener must make it mean—to those not ready, nonsense—to those with wells of resonance, then Joshua's horn a weapon a thimble a running of red and blue and purple and the gray edges of the hole left by suicide mome raths in Disney's version erasing up their tracks as they go, leaving the forest path empty sweeping up all traces that you my friend were ever here. Like a text that eats itself, eating my placenta on birthing, expulsion of natal vitamins in a PEZ dispenser laid down in my baby's grave in magic hour there were film crews following me to the edge of the yard I didn't care to speak and told them, "I am mourning the death of a child who came from my left hand to my right in the space of 13 minutes she spat and sang and cried to the carrion crow above." Then I was one with the dirt the filmic rain a condenser mic in my face recording the breathing noises of a thousand civilizations, initials of emperors wrought into stones you can step over with a bruised and bloody knee I bow to stones containing empty breaths in toxins out toxins once a princess tore her pocket on the sword of a king—right here in the devil's Camelot, the home of my schooling and youth, you wouldn't believe the dispensations cataloging from this tentative union of magic and muse—frightening the one who reads over my shoulder—my ghost can't even stand me anymore.
She reads YA fiction because she cannot stand the darkness.
She calls her mother once a week, checks Facebook for the news from high school, characters turned bigger and brighter and full of the same shit they were back then.
She tells herself she will only eat one—then she eats another and another and another.
She is normal, she can walk the streets.
She holds my hand when I am pregnant—she reads me Goodnight Moon. She reads The Little Prince. She makes my cocoa with the right amount of sugar and the right amount of chocolate and stirs it the right amount of times to please the underlings of my blood bubbles—brain—and uses the tiny marshmallows.
When you look over your shoulder do you see her?—She sits over the right and reads one sentence ahead to make it safe for you to proceed—to read and read and read—she comes to you in your sleep and cleans the room. She touches every corner and sweeps away everything you have learned since 17. She doesn't protect you. She is your witness. Bad things will still happen. But while you suffer—while the raindrops touch you—she sits in the corner with her hands folded above her knee—and she listens.