---
title: I wanted to tell you something
id: i-wanted-to-tell-you-something
genre: verse

project:
    title: Autocento of the breakfast table
    class: autocento
...

I wanted to tell you something in order [to][] \
explain the way I feel about the [Universe][], \
its workings, etc.  But I couldn't [yesterday][] \
---I'm sorry---I wanted only to [ball][] \
myself up and cry all day.  It was the [sixteenth][] \
day in a row this happened to me, and to [be][]

more than two weeks waiting to cry is, \
especially when, the whole time, I wasn't able to, \
absolutely horrible.  It was no sweet sixteen, \
I'll tell you that much.  Unless at yours, the Universe \
kept telling you to quit having such a ball \
and that you should have died, like, yesterday.

At first, it feels like you're winning---that yesterday \
you really were meant to die, but since you still _are_, \
you beat the system somehow.  But the Universe bawls, \
"No, I meant you should've crawled into \
a hole and fucking _died_!"  And then the Universe \
punches you right in the gut, something like sixteen

times, and all you can think is, "Some sixteenth \
birthday!  Maybe I will go die in a hole."  Yesterday, \
at times like this, is a luxury the cruel Universe \
refuses to give you.  This is when it's a pain just to _be_, \
when that Marvell line about "[rolling our stuff into one ball][Marvell]" \
just seems glib, when you don't want one body, let alone two.

Something else that may come as a surprise to \
you: over the past more-than-a-fortnight, these sixteen \
days, I've had nothing to eat but crackers and a cheese ball.  \
(That's not entirely true---yesterday \
I had some candy, peppermints and Jujubes.) \
Maybe this is why I'm so mad at the Universe---

because all it has ever wanted, this Universe \
that gave me life, fed me from its breast til I was two, \
and even before that, made a place in which I could be--- \
all it's wanted was for me to take the sixteen \
steps to sobriety, fold the Eight-Fold Path over yesterday \
and step around it lightly, as I would an exercise ball,

but the problem is, dear Universe, there's no way I could be \
something as hard as all that, to wake up yesterday \
morning, stretch over my sixteen selves, bound out like a ball.

[to]: poetry-time.html
[Universe]: initial-conditions.html
[yesterday]: exasperated.html
[ball]: ouroboros_memory.html
[sixteenth]: sixteenth-chapel.html
[be]: love-as-god.html

[Marvell]: http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/marvell/coy.htm