Method.
By which children learn to hate themselves.
Learn to hate their states.
Learn to perform. For you. You dog. Put us all on show in the living room, play the counting game where I count to a hundred and you tell me if I missed any numbers but you always lie. You say I missed 13 when I know I said 13! You say I missed 27 but I always check double that I said 27! And every time I miss a number according to you I have to start over. Standing on a block with electrical wires attached to my wrists and a cone head I'm the black KKK member who dies of fright. Cut me some eye holes, log in at the restaurant a readout says 1:08:13.27 the time it takes for us to get a table do you want me to sign in at every restaurant in the mall? Race them. I turn inward every time you speak, every piece of advice you give it's all there to help me walk into your lion's mouth and now that I'm a few years older still sparring with your psycho ass you're also a few years older and I'm not fighting you virile young you have the gray of ages, lines in your face for all the times you never cried. But the tracks are there anyway, showing everything you didn't do but should. I can't cut you down so close to death the men who sliced me at the ankles are now in hospice smoking Laffy Taffy but you can't get the jokes your pirate heart won't allow you and even the bird has left your shoulder.
I'm the fetus you're the cadaver and you never had any power over me it took my whole life to know that you were always just a house of cards and guess what you're deck is missing four aces I've had them in my backbone propping me up all this time and when I take them out I'm a slumper just like you neither of us had the will to stand yet we did battle anyway needing a monster on the outside to stand the monster on the in—born with gaping holes and gnashing teeth I am a regular wild thing causing mischief in my wolf suit wool rubbing between my legs and I need to get back to bed to reset an erotic grandfather clock chimes at midnight to let me know I'm home when you eat my cake I make up names for future children we might have if you slice me in two panty icing and rip and run, brother, rip and run it's meant to keep you there just long enough to open your eyes and see a mirror in my eyes. Saturday comes. Sunday comes. Every night I watch ANTM look at the ceiling and conquer the world. A single text and I don't even respond you'll be coming over tout suite I read Camus while you hack away at my jungle it's hot it's wet it sticks to your skin furnacing rain forest tracks somewhere in the middle Werner gives his monologue about killing, all the knotted tops and bottoms conquering each other exchanging oxygen and carbon a man gets shot in the neck with an arrow and I think I'll bring it home to my kids. Crossing the mountain with a cruise ship, all the while our five-toed kind exhibitions skin in three pools and one hot tub everywhere you look is something too old too young and one big soufflé ice cream dandy some Catholic brother telling me he likes to mix a little heat in with his air conditioning thank you mansplain and get your hand off my knee—this is the sort of thing I had to put up with in parochial school. There's always someone pretending to accidentally open the stall door except brother Rob stands there taking it all in some deep memory of sleeping in a tent a river of rain flowing between my legs and bugs so weird it takes me a minute to realize I'm in a dream.
Dream big, kid—so maybe you'll quench your thirst created in childhood to give you reason to run, to ride, to travel until you fall on your knees too thirsty to take another breath. I'm on the bus, going home, all my fetuses decorating the window frames and then it's my stop—always!—I have only certain seconds to collect all of you—my friends, my enemies, my parents, my children—and I'm picking them up putting them in my pack but the doors are closing and I have to choose between leaving you so I can get home or staying with my babies and missing my station.
Every kid on the bus is looking at me.
The grown-ups never do.
All my feti spread out on the floor.
Picking Angela—she's one with a Band-Aid X on her forehead.
Picking Braxton—he's half black so the real black people call him fake.
Picking Bert and Ernie—conjoined feti.
I get the ones I can and I'm stepping off the bus and hating myself as a mother 'cause I left you—some of you—behind.
Then the great light within opens up and says:
"Say you were a mother."
Check.
"And you had two kids, a bad kid and a good kid."
I think I'm both.
"Which one would you love more?"
Right. I get this one—I understand. You mean if I had a racist KKK David Duke motherfucker with an 80 IQ—like my uncle—and I had some kind of saint sage brill mother—say Maya Angelou—which one would I love more? Would I have sympathy for the bad one? And this is where I have to leave you—as I have never been a mother to even a full-term child. But as you find yourself gravitating to one of these poles—to love equally or to love one more—please cling to your answer with humility, because even though I am a child, I know enough to know there's no single answer to this question, no absolute, no solidity to comfort you.