all this practice, all this saying, all this scrambling about. god i need a cigarette, it’s been so long. how many days now? three? four? it’s hard to tell here, they do little to keep us in track, they do much keep us from knowing. first they blocked out the windows so we couldn’t tell if it was day or night, but i tried to follow my own internal clock. waking and sleeping and marking the cinderblock during the intervals. who knows how off i had gotten during that first week. they just took us of our cells and repainted the walls.
always and forever is just that, always always always. loving you always until forever, until the skin grows old, until the bones turn to dust. forever spinning outward through time, my limbs entwined in yours, my hand perpetually on your cheek, looking at eyes that look at mine as if for the first time. there have been such rocks before us, jagged and uneven, such rough patches of road where there appeared no respite. and yet here we are. five years later, over a decade later, here we are, still struggling to make this right, still finding something worthy, again and again, everyday, to say to each other gladly and without hesitation, always and forever, forever and always.
she puts it in boxes because she doesn’t know what to say when he screams. she can find a place for it if she thinks hard enough and if she forgets long enough and if he just shuts up for a second she can fold the lid over and shove it aside. if he just shuts up long enough, she can remember how to love him again, she can think of him without having to remember why she was with him to begin with. she thinks to herself without saying a thing to him, please just settle down, at least let this box gather some dust.
she puts it in boxes because the alternative would be cutting her womb open and letting it all spill out and maybe just maybe he would slip on the floor and crack his head open to notice. instead she makes room in the box, makes room in the basement for each new box. they aren’t all his, but he seems to be taking more room than she had ever planned for. it’s gotten to the point where she no longer bothers sweeping, she can’t see the floor anymore anyway, she’s starting to stack them all atop another.
she puts it in boxes because it’s all she knows how to do, it’s the only thing she thinks she does well. there’s always the bedroom and the kitchen but god knows she’s done trying with him. and the truth is it isn’t all that bad, half the things he says about her are true, how barren and worthless she’s become, but he always ends up being kind, up to a point. so she looks out the window and notices the frame, how it splinters, before she actually ever sees the street. are their boxes as big as hers, she wonders. do they need any boxes at all?
where had it been something like this, something green and smooth like the skin of it, like the slither between the vines and she said nothing of it, she said instead her nails were jagged with remorse and he couldn’t help but pluck the skin off the bumps of his spine and feed it to himself and grow them back out again. the cycle repeats like the sun and the moon and the seasons where the winter chills her bones and his skin cracks open with icicles and while she fingers his veins he plays with the nerves beneath her scalp and she tells him, if it weren’t for the musk we’d have been done with this a long time ago and he laughs caressing her thigh, you lie to me again, he reached up and pulled a leaf that turned from green to red to orange to dead in his hands, let’s lie to each other again.
and there’s this thing between us, and even though i put it there i cannot seem to get rid of it but you want to ignore it and i can’t ignore it because i can’t seem to move it out of the way, out of my line of vision and i think every time you look at me it’s all that you see, this sorry state of a person, this weakling, this pathetic piece of shit, and i want to tell you i love you and i want to tell you i love you but all i hear is vomit coming out of my mouth, i hear myself saying instead, i’ve got all this vomit in my mouth, and i feel that’s all i am to the world these days, all this vomit in front of you, all this vomit you cannot stand.
http://www.lifelinecryogenics.com/ http://www.cordblood.com/ http://www.viacord.com/
and every one of them has a picture of a goddamn kid on their front page.
here’s the skinny. the woman gives birth. while they wipe the kid down, the doctor goes back in. the placenta is delivered. parts of the umbilical cord are harvested. parts of it goes into a plastic bag. said bag goes to a place where they grow it. then they store it. you pay a yearly fee to keep it around. stem cells. just in case. in case one of your other kids develops bone marrow cancer or leukemia or anything else that’s sure to kill them. they just go back to the harvest. ninety percent match between siblings. shit, sixty percent match to the parents. it’s a potential cure-all that costs only pennies a day.
nevermind whether or not you can afford the procedure that would actually take those cells and make something useful out of them. these people are just a bank. what you do with the cells is your business, your problem, your responsibility. nevermind that they use pictures of happy and healthy children as if, when you store those stem cells with us, we can guarantee your child’s happiness, your child’s future, your child’s very life.
what’s even sicker is that health insurance doesn’t cover any of this. you can bang on our dime until your heart stops, but you cannot ensure any part of your kid’s future.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/28/world/europe/28greece.html http://abc.net.au/news/stories/2007/08/28/2016953.htm?section=world http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/newsid_5270000/newsid_5275200/5275284.stm
and the conspiracy theorists say it’s terrorists with a political agenda since elections are coming. and the environmentalists say it’s global warming that has caused all these droughts. and the people say it’s mismanagement on the part of the prime minister. and the ex-pats say it’s because they are using the army to fight fires and they’re nothing but kids too stupid for college. and the news says a woman tried to flee her village but the fire cut off the road. the news said she and a dozen other people rush into the olive groves instead. the news said they found her remains, arms wrapped around her four children, amongst the charred olive limbs.
she says to him,
you live in the past, you live like you have no future
i’ve had better guys than this, i’ve had better dates
i don’t understand your drug problem, i don’t understand why you need to fix
i’m everything you need right here, right here in front of you
it isn’t me you should quit.
and he says to her,
i thought i saw something in you but my hands are too brutal
i’m a roller coaster gone all wrong, i’m a shotgun in the mouth
the closer i get to you, the more nothing is ever enough
everything i need this needle for, comes from straight between my hips
i am the lie i need to quit.
