On My Twelfth Birthday
By the time I was ten I was already disgusted with the world. On my eleventh birthday I made a decision to close my eyes every time I saw or felt something I didn’t like. This childish ‘things will go away as long as you close your eyes’ has stayed with me to this day, well beyond the innocent stupidity of childhood. On my twelfth birthday I learned how to hold my breath when I didn’t like something, or felt slighted by something someone said or did to me. By thirteen I was often blue in the face. At fourteen I taught myself how to ignore the world by simply pretending it no longer existed. When I turned fifteen I was ravaged and reddened by acne and a much longer nose. At sixteen I had yet to kiss anyone other than my mother and her mother. By seventeen I was masturbating daily and with little regard for the wellbeing of that ‘thing’ between my legs. When I turned eighteen I left the continent of my mind for other less inhospitable geographies. When I was nineteen I lost my virginity to a woman whose name I didn’t know, nor cared to, in a two bedroom house abutting crags and mountains where I lived with four other men and three dogs, one of which I hated with a passion broaching on madness. On my twentieth birthday I feel asleep and have yet to awaken.
Milk-teeth
flail-points rasped to burr-edges on a match striker and a pull of yellow-sulfur air black with chamfer and junk-worry skin anointed with grain alcohol and puddle tarn, and the hex of her
arm roughshod with brittle lost in that corner where thoughts are devils, and children’s scabbed over knees are revenants of dog’s tongues, milk teeth and whalebone, and church spires tracing
blood and scrimshaw on the boughs of moth-nettled arms
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