so what
what if shel silverstein died in the playboy mansion & edgar allan poe at the strip club & elon musk at all? what if ursa major slurped me through a straw & spit my bones into a new constellation? what if the cocaine tasted like coffee & the coffee smelled like gasoline & the gasoline wept for mother theresa? it’s all just strobe lights & seizures that flip you between timelines & universes, slipping down thread, unbroken & sinuous. i glimpsed it, you know, the one where all the what ifs converge into the happenstances, the happenings, the reality. where i come home to a husband & four kids & sing lullabies & bake cheese lasagnas & matter. i’m always just waking up in my father’s arms after dropping through trap doors, petrified & befuddled & aware of my lack. always watching the room spin from the corner of the rave, the floor of the shower, the aisle of the best buy. all in a haze of nicotine stream. what is a self? where does the blood drip from when the heart has already lost its beat? what are these saltwater taffy limbs & kidney beans & what if we knew how to hold fast to dreams? my mother blames new york just like she blames vegas. i blame the planetary collusion overlooking my birth. & could this all have been avoided if he’d just loved me back? i think it should be easy but you both showed me how hard it must be. could you peel my flesh like i am the orange? who am i when all the pith falls away? i can’t tell my baby teeth from my brother & sister’s, can’t pick my soul out of a line up. but i’ve drowned out the screams, fallen from the trapeze. how much anger does it take to light a fire? how much nausea to put it out? how many pentacles to buy me some peace of mind? how many ribs to make me a god? woman. wounded. would it ever matter in the end? whether creamsicle or fudgesicle, tri-, bi-, unicycle? & what if the one with the unicycle had let me love him too? now we fade like rotten maps on pirate ships, chewed by bats & talking birds & polly wants a cracker & i want a sailboat. & i still believe in fairies, in tales, in rom-coms. i still believe in meet cutes & envelopes & reusing stamps to pull one over on the government, seventy-three cents at a time. some things are forever. somethings never decay in the crisper drawer despite your best efforts to remember to eat the spinach. sometimes you don’t need to remember to love. sometimes you must misremember to love. & register your firearm, your sawed-off baseball bat, your security system, your tank. i prefer avoidance & fear, the trespassing. god will forgive you. it’s the time of year i obsess over ten-day forecasts, waiting for the hint of spring, of hope, of a reason to keep living. it’s his birthday & the day you & i met eve. & i hate february. & november. i hate when everything is bleak. & i overdose on vitamin d, avoiding the bitterness, the fountain of freak. i got a new bed, tore up the one with traces of your skin cells, but you still sleep on my old dried blood, where i laid with so many who were never you. i’m doing all the things you wanted me to now, but for myself & not for you. though i suck cartilage from the bone & stamp my hoof. toss manure on your memory & dance under the moonlight barefoot, though my toes are frostbitten in this endless winter, the piles of half-melted snow, the groundhog & his shadow, the sugarplums all aglow. what if i write it all? what if i icarus? but i already did. wear my burnt-up flesh like armor & remake my bed. what if i tell the world or even just myself? what if castles bloom from my fingertips, empires from my canines? what if meadows grow in my tastebuds & happy ever after sprouts from my lashes? what if i drown you out & i become the god of this land after all? what if i, but if i, so what if i?
