Life’s Little Misdirections 🥀🦋

With All Love, Psychobabble

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/92017/opera-singer

I read this and look at what I wrote
I read Opera Singer by Ross Gay
and consider my own words and ask
who’s more confusing?
and I project your response

I hear your silence
I read every curved thing, or flat,
on your face from previous expressions
of a thousand, no thousands
of countenances launched, mostly fictional,
but real to me. As real as anything.
And I recall my father’s rejection.

I know my mother covered me
in Bell jar confections. But,
there’s salt in that love seeped in my wounds, because
I knew not hate from indifference,
I knew not love from pity

and Mother,
you said you never cried and I inferred,
took your tears as I regretted power given
my open hand upon your cheek,
because of that towering, quotable man,
‘Is that supposed to be a masterpiece’
not recognizing his jealousy at 16.

And, when that man you called husband attacked,
I was not protecting you or your youngest from him.
I was and was not a man at 18, but a boy
who wrestled a giant down to the Davenport,
sat on him, saw his shock, feeling my arms retract
every punch against his thick skull and jaw
because
I was not the authority, because
I knew love and that I loved him, as I told him I hated him.

I said that I did it for you and Jonny.
It was self-preservation. Cowardice.

He said I was strong after that. I took it as respect.
Felt pride because I tore wings off a butterfly.

He’s not a man, ideally feared. He was monster.
And, he was a child once.
He had his upbringing. I have my life.

So, you’re both dead and I still speak to you
from my still room, cab of my truck,
on wooded walks or wherever I go to find silence/solace
and reappear a normal kid, not some undiagnosed neurodivergent
that people have shaken their head at for years, since

I can remember my frailty, first human error
that launched a thousand fingers pointing blame.
As with the two of you, I respected.
But I despised all, instead of you, because
you are human. They are human, too.
I see that now…
I am the offspring of monster.
So, when I psychobabble, I measure input. Data.
Something makes my antenna go up.
Maybe, I’m alien and monster?

I just know 64 friends on Facebook,
not a lot. Can I stop now? Talk, to you?

They’re dead. Audience, I’m sorry I veil
this dialogue to you to seek anything like
empathy, sympathy or pity, in that order, since
I’m not worthy of love. And yes,
I don’t describe opera singers or children in diapers
(referring to Gay’s poem…should you read, too), but
in deliverance of a monologue typed herein.
Because the room would empty, long before
summation, conclusion, the point…

Picture my contorted face, as if it could show…
I don’t know how to reach you.

Okay,
Consider a computer with bad programming
with limited rewritable space and
very little time left to undo all that is wrong,
if a metaphor is what you seek.

I just need to know you won’t throw me out.
At least, put me on a curb, share
with someone who might find my worth (or,
harvest my gold from transistors, RAM and motherboard).

In this pale room at a vortices in life,
when PC language is so ignorantly, arrogantly
but tenuously employed —
I can’t get diagnosed with Asperger’s or autism,
a suggestible neurodivergent. Know
I’m atypical. Employ your friendship with compassion,
or empathy. Know I understand that Opera Singer writer,
while I don’t fully get him. Know I want to
learn secrets to each indecipherable puzzle in life,
the a-ha of it all. If not self-defeating.
Life’s little meanings could lead to one big truth —
or go wayward as the TV series Lost.
Why start something you can’t finish?

Life?

Why am I on this planet at all
reading ‘successful’ writers, while
my flourish of words
yearns to imitate similar outcome,
needs to be heard as understood,
to quell a lifelong need for rest
and actual silence, while I look out windows
of my home, cab and isolated spaces.
I’ve had to avoid you to avoid me.

I avoid the next words on my tongue; though,
thank you big pharma and prescribers, I have drugs

to keep me housed, keep indifferent pupils and eyebrows safe
from any expressions that unhitch a triggered muse-brain
from commonness of the lemmings. So I don't head down
another equatorial highway in growing, abhorrent senectitude.

That last part, I’ll look up. Maybe. I’ll tighten phrasing, line breaks,
just to be clear. Edit for punctuation, space the block-thick text,
deleting a few words. But be prepared, this blob poem
can only grow, as I ramble and metaphor more.

If you understand him but not me (you know who),
know I use that as fuel to bother all of you further.

In ernest, your psycho…babbler.


1.27.23
113 lines, need I count more?

no explanation needed. it’s all there…oops.