Pandora

This day is plotting grey, the clouds shrouding their true intent. I wish it would just rain already--heavy, icy drops that demand regard. I would offer myself bodily to such elements today; pray to be a human lightning rod, convey heaven to earth and back again--decode life from electricity, kindle my every dermal cell back to life, because I have forgotten my skin. I have forsaken feeling for thought; crucified my soma on a distant ridge. And so what I want to know is if it is possible to stop thinking and just feel. I want to know if your bodies ever seem estranged from you, like perhaps your brains are despots holding the rest of you in exile, or worse, have disappeared you altogether. I took Ecstasy for the first time when I was 19 for just such reasons. I wanted to know what it was like to *feel* for more than a minute or two. I wanted to overthrow the autocracy of Mind. I wanted to channel Orwell and impose punishment for thought-crime.

This day is plotting grey and grey is the loneliest abyss; black and white, light and dark, collided and confused. Grey is a Difranco melody that brings me every time to my knees: 

     "I feel right at home in this stunning monochrome, alone in my way. I smoke    and I drink and every time I blink I have a tiny dream, but as bad as I am, I'm proud of the fact that I'm worse than I seem. What kind of paradise am I looking for?" 

But see, I don't even need paradise. I don't trust perfection; I will inevitably constantly be flinching--always anticipating the fall of some invisible axe, precariously placed just above my head.
Do you ever get so tired that the world around you intermittently switches between cartoon and Hunter S. Thompson-Land?  And you can feel every pore on your body dilate like some kind of subtle acid trip? So tired you can't eat, can't unlock your jaw, and can't will your well-educated fingers to find the right keys? 

It is the dreams that do me in; take the natural cycles of body and mind and rearrange their DNA creating twisted mutations. And so I spend hours, nightly, trying to fight off the incessant insomnia that has plagued my ever-twitching eyes for as long as I can remember. I know that routine sleep is laced with chemicals, both legal and illicit, that tweak my dreams into vividly felt landscapes of tumultuous struggle; I know that 'natural sleep' is a psychopathic stress test that tries the limits of my sanity and my endurance and finds me often "stuck" in my dreams, forever battling one incursion or another. It is easier to forsake dreaming altogether. My body has taken to acting out seizures in desperate attempts to ward off dreams. 

It is because of this queer relationship with sleep that my viewpoints are askew. I imagine my lens to be slightly autistic--or at least I relate to that particular brain dysfunction. I 'get stuck'...on inverting words, by bright colors in cacophony (cereal aisles at the grocery store are one particular nemesis), the fluid train of syllables bleeding into each other...(other-otherworldy-wordy-worry-wry-rise-highrise-rise above-beloved)...and these spasms happen frequently which makes other people think I am not hearing them; zoning out...but really I am honing in-- on something they have said, or a word that I saw on a billboard, or a phrase I heard in a song that is playing in the background, and it hijacks me for a moment.  But I don't mind it most of the time, because I have been indentured to words since I was quite young, and I often wish someone else could articulate the labyrinth I wander daily; could navigate the topography of a brain that is both menaced and blessed by a chronic, tectonic grinding.

Poetry knows me and accepts me for my particular tilt. She is my midnight blues. My sad jazz saunter. My subterranean sonata. Ever since I read Ginsberg's 'Howl' for the first time, I have forever associated the slow, aching supplication of brass and bass and beat with the fervid fornication of words pulled bodily, one into another; a magnetic collision which leaves one flinching, waiting for the inevitable shatter.

"...and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow

            of  the band and blew  the suffering of America's naked mind  for love

            into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered

            the cities down to the last radio

with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies

            good to eat a thousand years."

My screen name, confessionalpoet...it is an obvious homage to Sexton, Plath, etc. I began studying them and writing my own first tenuous pieces at around 13 years old. I couldn't absorb enough of their words. It had something to do with laying their blood and guts on the altar, naked at the pulpit. Smiling. There is so much power in smiling in spite; a justified smirk and a tacitly clenched fist. I want to be able to dissect myself in words like they did, forsaking the euphemisms of Woman altogether.
The confessional poets were a clan. I envy them that. But there is an unnamed,  relative responsibility between communing writers. There is the responsibility to integrity, and to truth; to blooming, mutually. It is community (albeit an endangered one). It is collectivity. But I am devoutly committed to the belief that it is also a lifeline to sanity sometimes. Also, consider alchemy--the (in)fusion of elemental substance. You never know how you might extraneously create gold.

These thoughts...these fragments of desire and mental meandering are but a few contents I keep neatly wrapped, stored unassumingly in my head. My tongue doesn't know the way to this place, and so I am labeled uncommunicative. Is this simply a predilection for compartmentalization; boxes impounding the arsenal of memory under manually disabled neurons? 

Boxes. Boxes. Boxes. I must invoke this mantra and say with a stoically stiff upper lip: Even Pandora was given hope to assuage the sorrow.