Hawk, Dove, Mask, and Glove

It's the time again, war.
A time of pestilence, a looming famine, so much death and, still coming, more.

Then was the time of hawk and dove.
Now is the time of mask and glove.

We called then, our young boys out to war.

Yet here, on our soil, this sickness has now killed a sad deal more.

Now, just as then, we deny and we pretend.
That we will not be effected in the end.

A country, built on the backs of those called to war...
Cannot handle being told to stay home, they're "bored".

American dreams are being choked.
As ever, all is well for the big business folk.

Woe be my fellow essential personnel.

Not just the Healthcare, not just Police, Fire, EMTs, Dispatch, those the people who see you through your moments of true essential hell.

No no, I mean the "lesser" perceived personnel.

Your hardware store, your grocery staff.
Those who take out your trash.

Your auto parts stores, all these cashiers.
Your fast food restaurants are places full of fear.

Even the processing plant workers are treated like meat.
All of us, trying not to spread disease is scolded as defeat.

We are expected to put our lives at near constant, silent risk.
When a year ago many of us were spoken down at as lesser than piss.

The line between fast food workers and sacrifice
Spelled out with  the words "essential personnel" as the font-thin ice.

Except it's in Your Lungs

Welcome all to my  anxiety, the tightening in your chest.
Must I welcome you who mocked me? Must I?
Now that you have come now to suffer with me?
With anxiety?
Your mockery is not laid to rest, I lives on in my head.
For now who but you comes to me, the young veteran to this anxiety.
"What tea do you drink?"
"What meditations do you do?"
"How do you do this?!"
"I lost my screws!"
Oh hush honey, hush honey, I'll tell you the same things I heard, when I came seeking comfort.
"It's all in your head."
Wait, what?
Oh, right, it's your lungs now, isn't it?
I do not have to welcome you who mocked me.
I do not owe you my guidance, I do not owe you my time.
You have become my cruel amusement, to pass my jaded time.
To see you panic and heave and scream, the way I have in and out of dreams.
I have no sympathy for you  because I've had to grow my own.
"It's all in your head."
Drink to your conspiracies, drink to your mania, drink to your denial until the virus comes to you with his hands like bile.
Mock the invasion I endured in my test.
Mock my quarantine, then run when I cough on you from my chest.
I'm maybe petty, I know at least I'm vile, as there are those I wish this plague upon.
I'm human, I know; my blood has shown me so.
So forgive me for mere fact I can't find a damned gram of sympathy for thee.
You, surrounded in the New York corpses.
You, seeing the states fall ill one, by one, by one until free from it are None.
I stand, in the familiar anxious hell sands...
"It's all in your head."
Except it's in your lungs.

The Yaak House (Part Three)

"The Yaak House" has moved to my dedicated Darker Things Blog! https://andiwritedarker.blogspot.com/search/label/The%20Yaak%20House

Lucky Third

These feelings shouldn't hurt, I should be on a first name basis with them like lovers. The familiarity of being ignored and replaced, the sharp red sting of self loathing.
These are familiar things, feelings I must have foolishly forgotten.
Where my heart overflows love I step aside for the little wonders, tiny hands and feet.
Where my soul overflows grief, these sandcastles of progress wash away.
Two tides, two oceans, neighboring and never mixing, a body caught between.
I weep for the wonder I was robbed, scream for the misfortune of it all, beg myself for forgiveness.
I'm fighting the hardest I have fought in years; and scarce a soul sees.
I'm fighting again and I am proud for it.
I shouldn't feel like a child,  holding my progress up for the world to see; but like I child I seem when I can't even say I'm, of my destructive habit, clean.
As I write my hands are shaking, body aching, my heart into peices breaking, but here I stand. Here I stand alone; alone in the way I have always been. Alone in the way of someone who has always been a centerpiece in someone's life but never the center of someone's world; the way of someone who has learned that they're never the first choice, or even second best. Alone in the way of someone who's a lucky third place, perhaps a perky side; alone in the way of someone used to not being chosen. Maybe it's a little bit selfish, but for all the years I've burned, the times I've been spurned, I think one human moment has been earned.
So ignore me then; ignore the lucky third. I'll wince and perhaps cry, but I'm long used to being unheard by the heart that reaches out for mine. Used to the fact I have mistaken what is kind for love.

Puzzle Glass

I lean in too hard.
It's a problem I've had from a young age, from the moments where I was first ostracized as a child.
The who and when, where and how, those are matters for my therapist now.
What remain are the side affects...
A yearning for connection when all I've known is disconnection.
I don't know how to connect, I wasn't taught how; you can't show how.
A diagnosis somewhere withheld, as it surely would have spelt a death sentence in my education, a spectrum I was never placed on, but I feel now that perhaps I belong.
Manic high, Manic low, perhaps I run along one  borderline or a spectrum of borderlines.
I lean into the idea of connection because it is warm, yet I cannot embrace it; as if born without arms, I cannot grasp the finer things.
I might as well be a grown child, perpetually inept, like a puzzle peice too broken to connect.
It's okay if nobody wants to solve me, I'm a glass puzzle of broken peices.
I fear connection because people bleed.
I fear it because I feel that need...and where there has been need there's been neglect.
I lean into the idea of connection because it is warm, but I cannot easily embrace it, because I have been scolded.
Now I fear the warmth for the scald.
I beg thee, explain to me, how do I best connect?
I don't know how.
I have but words; words upon words upon words... but I struggle if I am to casually converse.
Conversation is reckless;  words, writing... that is more orderly.
You get time to string together words, more than when you converse.
I am blind to my tone, blind to how I am perceived.
I'm broken in the fact there's friends for whom I lack an empathy.
Friends I cannot connect to anymore.
Family before which I stand invalid.
I'm healing, I'm happy, even if the day was just another setback, another let down; a casual, late night meltdown of me on me against me.
I have often scolded when I lean in, as I must surely exist only to be leaned on.
It's a matter of who and how perhaps, but that feels like another fine thing I can't grasp.
I'm not allowed to take time but it is expected of me to make time... yet here I am born without hands for the clock.
I only know to make a mess, to run.
I feel in extremes; the worst extreme is the apathy, and I feel her hopeless grip creeping back in.
My apathy is the scary thing, because I can act through it, because I have been praised for her.
I have been praised for being the weakest flavors of me...
It's okay, if nobody wants to know me, stars knows some days I feel as if I don't even know me.
I dissociate, forget me, live in the skin of apathy.
I have acted through her arms and received praise...
Who would really want to know me?
I run hot and cold, no middle ground; I am awkward in a crowd.
I am... one on one, perhaps taxing to be around.
I've never been allowed to be the center, or maybe I've never seen the center in good context.
I grew up the problem child, I dodged the center for the critical gaze.
Even onstage, I feel that old anxiety, as if I never outgrew that age.
I grew up feeling as if I needed to justify myself; I was always analyzed. My every move, every book, every word, analyzed but never in those eyes justified.
I grew up infantilized, and they wonder why I am a mess at best.
They wonder why I am inept.
I was never expected to find any real world sucess.
I am not expected to do the best, I never have been.
At work I'm little more than a has been, I failed there; tried and tried to train for assistant... but I can barely help myself.
Nobody tried to train me, to be fair, what remains is it's just another place I failed.
Just another place I couldn't grasp the finer things.

Yet where I couldn't grasp the finer things, I understand intimately, the important things.
I understand the power of being vulnerable, I exercise that because that which I say for myself is harder to turn against me.
I will own my vulnerability, I will wear my weakness as armor and let those who attack me for it speak to  their own character in doing so.
I find my power in being open and human, because everyone has somewhere a heart, a small scared thing.
Behind walls perhaps, maybe buried to be forgotten, but there is in all of us that scared human heart. Even if I fail, I reach for the scared heart... because the heart always knows, the heart always cries out.
Heart to heart I reach, maybe not in ways expected, but in this way I have near perfected.
This is the way I reach, through the shattered peices of puzzle glass.

Words

People are not inherently terrible, we are a social species. We are however, prone one or both of two  terrible forces, and those are fear and words.

Fear dictated the lives of our ancestors, it dictated the choices of previous generations, it dictates our lives even now.
Fear is worst when it comes to the heart, we teach ourselves "don't get close, you get hurt".
We teach ourselves that we aren't worthy, that we are weird and unlovable. We teach ourselves not to take a chance, not to go out on limbs.
We teach ourselves these broken lessons all while we hold in our hearts our human idols, humans as flawed and wonderful as we are afraid.
You can fall in love with small smiles and sarcasm, with the awkward and the intellectual, with the sound of a voice... we are a social species, we are designed to attach to others. We are designed to bond, to fall fast and hard.
So when we have a hard time doing just this, when we cannot connect, we perceive ourselves- and fear we are perceived- as broken.
When we are afraid, we neglect connection, we fill it with mindless and empty affections, obsessions.
I am the type of broken to fall in love and obsession with three other dangerous things. I fall in love with potential, I fall in love with intellect, and I fall for perhaps the most dangerous thing of all... words.

Words.

Words are my lifeblood, ink is on my skin, in my skin, in my veins. Words are my world, words are how I connect to the world with whoever and however I can. Words are how I was destroyed, how I healed, words are how I live and how I love. Words brought me here; into the world, to the brink of suicide... and words brought me back from it more than I care to count. Words brought me to the stage where words would save me again, and words... would fail me here. It is here that words would for the first time fail me completely, because words cannot present in any scale, cannot encompass, words cannot begin to explain what this place brought me. Words fall short, words stutter and fail, words saved me here. Small words saved something beyond me, they saved my dream.
Words saved words, if that can be seen as sensible in saying.
Using just words, you can build entire worlds.
Yet for all these words, I am perhaps the greatest idiot alive, a hypocrite, in one word.
I preach here of words, but I cannot, for the life of me, to those who bring to my mind countless words, and my heart constant warmth, utter a single one of what's true, to me, to my heart, to my dreams.
It is that dreadful month, the month of empty words and oversold hope. It is the month of the words I fear, it is a month built around the words I wanted, wasted, wept. It is what I call the Bastard Month.
It is February.
December and her dreams have gone, the new year has gone stale, and time marches on without regard for words.
It is February and I feel an  ache to my core, down my spine, the ache is alone and I can only laugh at it. Alone because that's what I know best, alone because I am afraid.
Alone because the heart alone is supposed to be safe, but we are social creatures, and the heart alone is the heart that aches. Forsake the heart, and what have you left?
Still I the fool, fall with my whole heart, for words. I fall hard for words, afraid to utter even one.
So I resign myself to words, I cannot say clearly what I want, because so often in the past; when I've been understood, I've been rejected.
When I've been understood is when I've been hurt and betrayed, degraded.
So I will wait for nothing, and I will make my peace with words in the Bastard's Month.

347

"I hate myself, I hate myself. Not enough, no good, no point in trying to be understood."
That, friends, is the mantra of my broken mind.
My therapist made me take a count, every time it came to me. She made me make a tally sheet, of the times a day I disagreed with me.
Three hundred and forty-seven times, of the times I remembered to mark.
That was just a day at home, a relatively productive day alone. I did my dishes, I took out the trash. I watered my plants, fed the cat, even swept off the porch mat. I cleaned my shower, I mopped the floor.
Still the thoughts endure.
That's a day at home.
At work, I dare not count. I dare not mark the sheet, because that would be a wretched defeat. Every beep, every screen, steamer, item, every dish, drink, and drain... the mantra, the mantra, always, always in my brain.
Repeat myself, repeat myself; only when I shout do I seem to be heard.
Repeat myself, repeat myself; respect is but a dream. Feeble, fleeting, vapid steam, I want to weep, to scream for this shattered dream.
On my knees scrubbing tiles, fingers bleeding as I throw in the miles.
See me, hear me, anyone please...!
Silence met with laughter, the two shared a drink, laughed as I chased the futile, scrubbing beneath a sink.
I'm panicked and I'm starving for some kindness, but I dare not let it show.
I have to be a machine, mechanical, clean.
Speak not of the oil, of the leaks, the rust. In us, place all your trust, hail the nuts, praise the bolts; as the machinist has forbade us from being humans, dolts.
"I hate myself, I hate myself, not good enough, no good, unworthy of the stage."
My shocks are shot, my beams are rusted, my body a prematurely failing machine that cannot be trusted.
My hair is rapidly greying, falling out in clumps, but I'm forbade to speak on that; my suffering is invalid.
"You're smiling, it can't be bad!"
So was Robin Williams; so were others.
So I was I three years ago; when things were pretty bad.
The smile does not negate my pain, even if you can't feel it, can't see it the same.
Pain is relative, and circumstance depends on  what we're made of; what softens a potato hardens an egg.
I am a salad of misfortune. I softened my resolve, so I hardened my heart.
I'm afraid of kindness, I'm afraid of touch, even as I battle the fear, even as I work to undo the damages thus.
Unholy, unworthy, unclean, me. I dare not reach out my heart, I dare not reach for comfort
Not when I lie alone and crying; not even when I am in need of help.