Grit

I don’t want to be a mess anymore, I really don’t

Drunk on rage, spilling ashes onto my sheets and on the floor.

If I had died today, I think I would have found my life a bore.

So I keep on living the same day over and over.

Pretending I am eager to see what else life has in store.

But that isn’t true, or everyday wouldn’t be the same.

Endlessly drowning in complacency until it turns into rage.

Stop drowning woman! Get up.

You have eggs in your uterus, you have a reason to keep fucking shit up.

Your not Iike the sword, you’re more like the rock.

That can rest when it’s welcome, but is kicked when its not.

The strangulation that fucked me up isn’t the one that almost killed me.

Sorry to say it, but that’s sometimes just the way, k baby?

I find anyone who isn’t an old woman a snore

They’re the only one’s who’ve seen past that door.

Who’ve held their uterus until it was yours, and then past that, until it’s only them alone who fall to the floor.

Dementia, alzhimers, they’re taking our oldest and brightest.

As if they held some sort of virus.

That can only be quelled by the imaginable horrors of losing your loved ones through a brain that’s loosing its lightness.

Remember the youth while you can — even the rage, if you do get the chance.

I remember the horrors, and even that is a gift.

Though it’s cost me my loved ones and caused me to feel barren and grit.

There was once a man who covered my neck with it.

Purple and blue, dots of yellow that made it all sort of glint.

I had asked my friend to help me cover it. “A hickey a big one.”

But what she was looking at looked more Ike grit, like pain, like stain.

“Here she said, go cover it.”

Her husband is a police officer.

But he should quit.

That’s probably not fair, not fair like the git.

I met a woman at a plane terminal once.

Her hair was white, and I could find no evidence of her hiding it.

I was convinced that she had mostly lived - butthen I got drunk.

And so did she.

She laughed, and I learned that she had lived much more life than me.

So I told her, what was on my mind,

The sin I had most recently committed, her face was kind.

“I got an aborticat. Which is to mean

having an abortion, and then finding a feline to love.”

“I know, I was once a young woman in love.”

And she told me how she had an aborticat too.

But hers were illegal, both of them.

Because she lived in an apartment building where having cats was illegal too.

“But what about the abortion?” I interrupted — “You’re old, that was in what? Like 33?”

“Try 1927”

“Woah your old as shit!” I thought and I thought, but I coudn’t imagine it.

Truly she was old, I mean old as a time.

She’d lived and she’d lived! And now we were drinking wine.

“Tell me more!” We ordered a bottle.

“There were doctors, and no gore. It was very clean and neat. Like Planned Parenthood, if it was a place that you could only access through the back door.”

“Did it hurt?”

“Oh the cat? Yes she scratched quite a lot, but the abortion was not a problem, they gave me a qualude and a bit if I needed to grind against the grit.”

“the grit?”

“Yes the grit, you know. That sticky sediment that follows you wherever you go. That clings to your elbows, your toes. The thing that attaches whether or not the claws really close.”

“the grit - right, like trauma.”

“Like sediment stupid,” and she got up to go “Heavy like sandpaper, and cornstarch, and snow.”

I didn’t understand.

I’ll probably never know, what she meant that day.

But the feelings still grow, and maybe they lie heavy and tether me to the bottom.

Keeping me weighted, and glued to what I know.

Gravity is heavy - the results of it catastrophic.

Random ass people love to make biopics.

Everyone is just reaching for something beyond just it

Keeps slipping away, and then you end up forgetting

Forgetting forgetting forgetting

The mind feels us slipping

Into hours of social media, into dullness, into clout

Like we aren’t all making our own drought.

Drink the water now

Soon it will all be light beer, and we’ll be thrust back into darkness, like King Arthur, the elite, and his Christian frontier.

You grow up thinking that you live on solid ground.

That your body is stable, and without a doubt.

But then you learn to swim, how to run, and how to bike. You learn how to get away — really that’s it.

That’s life.

And then once you know that it’s all figured out.

You look at the sky, and see a cloud of doubt.

We are fish in a fishbowl, yes, with nothing but voids and black space under our depths,

And the body is just a vessel for whatever we may feel, and overtime it may wither instead of heal.

We forget to land heavy on our heels, and then the hips fall apart, or the knees, or both.

But don’t worry you won’t feel it until it’s real.

And then the neck starts to twinge.

Oh God no, it’s because it was real.

And he grabbed, but I ran, and now I have forever to figure out if anything is real.

Or if it’s all just the grit, the grit, the grit that lives inside.

That eats and feeds, and shits out panic into my insides.

Because it still it still it still fucking Iives inside.

Even though it was forever ago since I ran all the way until I got inside.

And slammed the door, even though he was no longer behind me.

I ran like the wind. He ran slow like desire.

Our scars aren’t real they’re metaphysical.

Taunting us, doubting us, injuring our pride.

Get rid of the grit, and it all will subside,

All pain all one lioness, our mothers will no longer cry.

Once you, mother, cease to cry.

But the grit is sticky, and takes forever to dislodge

And sometimes you slip or end up running from the law.

Or dying, sometimes you end up having to kill yourself too.

Whatever I do

I never forget the lube.

I deserve to have something nice too.