#0
Anodyne
And there
are times, just like a few minutes ago.
I became
lost in my mad architecture. The phone rings.
I take a
sip of tea and replace my cup in the saucer.
Do you
know the safe house? The safe word?
There is
no noise. No disturbances. No gossip.
We speak,
we listen and hope to be heard.
We listen
to the gaps between the words
The open
secrets muffled in accepting
The ways
in which we cannot change.
It is
easier this way, less embarrassing. Utterly unbearable.
When I find
reality intolerable, I am just as crazy as you.
Tweaking,
redecorating, turn the foundation to face the sun.
That is a
charitable reading of what I am trying to say.
You’ll say
my bartering is childlike petulance.
But my
blusters come in the nature of a child
Being
beaten by his mother. Punched, slapped, degraded.
The child
will plead with his mother to stop.
The mother
does not stop but hits harder.
The child
cannot stop her and begins to beg.
The
beating continues. The mother does not stop.
He begins
to bargain with her. If you stop, I’ll be good.
If you
stop I’ll say a prayer for you. If you stop I’ll do …
And then
that too proves to be insufficient. She hits harder.
And in the
strange absence of a deal, the child dreams up a door.
A magic door
the child can run through. A door to another place,
Another
home in which there are no beatings, a languid place
From their
fights and her drunken embarrassments.
The snide observe
the contradictions, modest and profound.
Do you
recall the safe word? It is closure, an enclosure,
A fantasy
of mourning, a grief word that lies in the mind
Of others
and burns as a fiction of a final explanations.
—Geoffrey
Gatza
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