Creature of My Own Invention
When I first made it, it was just three words. “I feel incomplete.” A statement, simple; a sentiment to describe an emptiness, a longing. I never could have known that it would… develop, as it has, taking small bites of life when I didn’t notice. Accumulating, assimilating it grew, adding to itself. Maybe I should be proud. Proud of its cunning and wit and skill. It grew in word, in feeling, in scope and grandeur. It fulfilled itself. Incomplete. It became Shelly next door when she let me feel them, “…only outside of my shirt. Okay?” It became her mother, breath thick with alcohol and cigarettes, hands soft, “Does that feel good? Does it? You want to see how I can feel good?”
It was shame and confusion and excitement too. What sin ever made left no room for pleasure? That asshole Kevin at school; he grew it taking my pencil just to hear me beg for it back. Or Mr. Grane, watching and letting him do it, hating the “little pale puss-fag.” Maybe he saw himself in me then. These things, all of these things adding to nothing and the incompleteness growing. The idea is there, the picture formed. My life went on, I grew, like my statement, my sentiment, my other. It whispered to me while I slept. It replayed its building block scenes of scar and tear and empty holes, holes ever deepening and ever filling.
I crack my neck a lot, twisting my head hard to the side and back. It’s compulsive. Sometimes the smallest of shocks shoots up my neck and into my face and I see out of other eyes. My wrists are slim, knots of bone on either side, like bolts I sometimes reflect. Hot water on my wrists, the heat travels. It climbs my arms, my shoulders and my chest. I breathe fire in these times. The wind stirs my hair and my scalp rises, imperceptibly, above my brow firing cold air against my brain, nitrous-shock ride to the system. I swallow saliva, rust sweet with blood, grinding my teeth again. I cry and never outwardly and never notice. I do not notice and you do not. I sit beside you on the bus. I smell like honeysuckle and cloves. Or I grin at you at the bookstore, over the cover of some garishly colorful and oversized book, an equally oversized coffee and sugar concoction at the will of my left hand. You grin back. You are interested or ill and run to the bathroom. Sometimes I follow you back and sometimes we write a stain on the wall. I leave alone and maybe you see me at work, each day with a grin and a “Morning.” We complain about work. We leave. Where do we go? What are we made of outside of the role? What is driving, who is at the wheel, what the hell have you just done!
I’ve strangled you in khakis and slit your throat in an embroidered polo shirt. My loafers have been stained with your piss and your blood and your tears and your saliva, begging and pleading on your knees. You’ll really do anything? And nothing that a good scrub and polish could not erase. My nails are trim but enough to raise the blood. My hair is short, neat. I sit by you at church. I buy my ground beast of burden at the fast food joint. You showed me the ketchup when I seemed confused. I sleep on cotton and scent my sheets with mint. I bathe in rose oil and patchouli. I sing along to the commercials and vote for the next Best American Singing Star. I wear a razor belt around my stomach and get butterflies as I push through a crowd.
What beast has ever left a grave, howled at the moon or craved your sweet candy-cane neck so and been the danger that is my thought now? I feel incomplete.
