Loganthinks

Standing in the shower until the skin on my gut and chest is flushed, I am claustrophobic.
I am thinking like an animal caught in a maze, running in shrinking circles.
I am running around pieces I have already pegged in, having taken too many turns to find my way back to where I was when I first placed them

I am at the end of that game,
that stupid IQ triangle game,
carved out of wood sitting on my sunlit living room table in a memory of my house that shines only in contrast to the opaque fucksweetnothing which I live in now

I cannot be kept company only by books that teach me of colossal failures

The books don't redeem my sense that we are all hopelessly lost with our fingers inches from each other's unknowable faces

the books are long, incalculable intricate things

fuck you

you can't write a book, weekend warrior, stay at home mom

I can't write a book

the cirlce that tightens in my mind is a rat on a string, scratching faster and faster in hopes of finding something worthwhile to get across with words and paper before it pins itself to the dark, lonely heart and can no longer function

for in that there is purpose, which to neurotics like me, is sustenance

a mythic ham sandwich

And to have someone, anyone, read my words on paper and smile... is to get to eat that sandwich, although it is all a bit of a silly fantasy, because the reader and I know that we both have no idea what eachother is thinking, that we can only guess at what these intangible sandwich words mean

This is what school tells me I will do, write these words on paper

but I will not do it in a book, born of alien creatures researching the history of glove-making and staring at walls covered in sticky notes.

I have been in school all of my life and I am still no closer to understanding how to compile a thought that lasts longer than 20 pages

past those 20 pages, the books tell me, is an exercise that only discovers lonliness

but it's lonely here, too


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