The Princess and the Pea

Jigsaw strains my mind awake.  The witching hour sends hard shards down the outside of my thigh, particularly in a nestled coupling of insect bites, as if they knew the crux of my sweetness.  They're flying circles low, somewhere above the bar, drunk on me as is everyone who manages to swim the moat of foul words, crass promises and detached obsession.  That's the sound my leg is making, quietly pulsing each dream-wake thought running the river round itself, made drier each hour by the white of the moon, which laughs every time I think I'm healing within circumstance.

Face down, into the thick wheat coloured rug, pillows form my princess bed, no pea any prince could feel for, when there's lots more interesting maneuvers above the lone green proof of my forgotten royalty.  Quiet hum of a/c, cats raping and running as my stillness refuses to shut itself up, and return to the business of dreaming...The witching hour provides none of the gusto it once held above me; no ghosts, no fear- of anything outside of myself.  I feel as if the world has died into its night, and I am the only one left.  I try to get away from the leg, from its connections to my ankle, my calf, the back of my knee, the rupture of my ass, with its crucifixion process laying the latest jesus in my mind down onto me, blanketing me with every sounding note.  A man sits at the piano- I hear its wood gently pushed up and in.  A few chords, but mostly lone notes soothe me, as my ear listens to the carpet earth, thick and muffled and 3 floors up.

Soon I'm back in bed, dreaming thirty or forty explicit and well lit adventure stories - pulp, plot, fears and noises coming back to me, and no matter which way I turn, it's not what I thought it was.  Too many pictures to focus in on one serious thing.  Before you know it, the pain dulls, my mind keeps its working into itself, even without me at the helm, light searing in from far off sky, over the small, abandoned factory that hasn't let a soul in for some length of time.  It holds within it all the dreams I'm not finished with yet.  My claw marks are from climbing In, and not holding on- the ship sails because of their force, and is not held in stasis anymore.

The pain has been my close friend, and comfort and reminder of all that is not finished with me.  I've got time, and I've felt that feeling too, the one of understanding what it feels like to know the pain is outside of me and not coming back, even when it does.  Once I figured that out, the feeling of being healed with invisible elixir, whatever face it may take (it's always my face so I better get used to it) I know there's an open road.  It knows I can live without it.  Not even a good fuck can keep pain under my spell.  So I put my heart wild and bloody into it with each deadpan sensation of sickness which remains.  And I wrap myself around him and take him in every night.  One day the final dream will have me waking up in utter peace and good health.  He'll have to thumb a lift on down the road to the next sucker.  We all take our turn after all.

M. Lucia