Self

 

Oh, Mother, I’m tired and I hate myself again,

I have always been a coward, dragging my selfish, greedy body through the streets to avoid the sunrise again and again and again,

passing through these canals of emotion on my way to absent adolescent pleasure,

I feel like I’m only going for you,

past everyone I’ve loved and thrown away in my capitalist interest to want more, need more, have to have more to have happiness,

past the teacher who offers me a candy bar, which I always decline to resume my shoddy attempts at pity,

past the beautiful girl who finds me when I am lost beside the river in a bundle of twigs,

past the kitchen door where you fall out the window while I eat the peanut butter sandwich that keeps me alive while I try to die with your hand down my throat,

past the rose that burns me when I grab it between my fingers and crush crush crush,

I go for you, Mother, only for you.

They told me sonnets need their form, but nothing I know ever stays recognizable,

and as I think about it,

I remember that you may not be my mother but a woman set in stone- a statue that is not the truth rather a lie so cleanly sculpted by sonnet-worshipping hands that it seems like art,

created through years of foul play, wasting time with your palm upon my face in the least gentle of caresses,

acting like two old friends, two best friends, the way I felt your hand harden and soften, hug and release,

angry yet amused yet awoken by stillborn shame,

lulling yourself to sleep in drunken domination of the innocence of every child,

as I lie still- the hurt, torn, mangled remnants of your orgy,

I lie as still as lets me sink away into the sea.

How do you do what you do? I have seen the room tumble and roll and cough and stutter as you enter,

walls shrink back in fear of reprimanded cottage cheese and Asian casserole and the CD player that never stood a chance against a mix of hip hop and pop, pip pop and hop

I can feel the sky burning while you try to keep your mouth shut about all of the choices I’ve made and the people I’ve brought home-

we are all thrown into blind dreams about the use of materialism to perfect a society of uncontrollable desires and unshaven beards,

unable to be compared to one another because debate is arbitrary and useless when your mind is a clusterfuck of repressed imagination after nineteen years of watching motorcars burn on the highway and only feeling sad because it’s not static enough to write down beautifully.

Mother, I meant for this to be your requiem,

to recreate your syntax and internal plot and leave you shaking and howling on the side of the road like an animal, domesticated and then lost again, put back in the forest as a summary of wilderness and the entire index of humanity,

to feel more than 27 of the ways to be happy- I want to know all 7000 of them!- and release myself from the cycle of pessimistic a******s who are self-absorbed in the same words as I am,

to stop kissing your colorless marble lips in favor of the framed painting that looks at me with teary eyes- the painting that attacks the canvas through bold lines of vegetable oil and waits and waits and waits for me to grow up and crawl past your statue that is so permanent it kills the ground,

to show you myself in the spotlight of artistic self-expression and rejection of the mores of conventional society, all in favor of pure beauty,

Oh, Mother, I will rearrange the letters until I can no longer feel the way you make me feel,

until every breath I take resembles more truth and more hope and more faith and more thought!

Until you are not able to take up arms against me, for I will be no more within your range of fire.