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<h1 class="title">I wanted to tell you something</h1>
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<p><span class="line">I wanted to tell you something in order <a href="poetry-time.html">to</a></span><span class="line">explain the way I feel about the <a href="initial-conditions.html">Universe</a>,</span><span class="line">its workings, etc. But I couldn’t <a href="exasperated.html">yesterday</a></span><span class="line">—I’m sorry—I wanted only to <a href="ouroboros_memory.html">ball</a></span><span class="line">myself up and cry all day. It was the <a href="sixteenth-chapel.html">sixteenth</a></span><span class="line">day in a row this happened to me, and to <a href="love-as-god.html">be</a></span></p>
<p><span class="line">more than two weeks waiting to cry is,</span><span class="line">especially when, the whole time, I wasn’t able to,</span><span class="line">absolutely horrible. It was no sweet sixteen,</span><span class="line">I’ll tell you that much. Unless at yours, the Universe</span><span class="line">kept telling you to quit having such a ball</span><span class="line">and that you should have died, like, yesterday.</span></p>
<p><span class="line">At first, it feels like you’re winning—that yesterday</span><span class="line">you really were meant to die, but since you still <em>are</em>,</span><span class="line">you beat the system somehow. But the Universe bawls,</span><span class="line">“No, I meant you should’ve crawled into</span><span class="line">a hole and fucking <em>died</em>!" And then the Universe</span><span class="line">punches you right in the gut, something like sixteen</span></p>
<p><span class="line">times, and all you can think is, “Some sixteenth</span><span class="line">birthday! Maybe I will go die in a hole." Yesterday,</span><span class="line">at times like this, is a luxury the cruel Universe</span><span class="line">refuses to give you. This is when it’s a pain just to <em>be</em>,</span><span class="line">when that Marvell line about “<a href="http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/marvell/coy.htm">rolling our stuff into one ball</a>”</span><span class="line">just seems glib, when you don’t want one body, let alone two.</span></p>
<p><span class="line">Something else that may come as a surprise to</span><span class="line">you: over the past more-than-a-fortnight, these sixteen</span><span class="line">days, I’ve had nothing to eat but crackers and a cheese ball.</span><span class="line">(That’s not entirely true—yesterday</span><span class="line">I had some candy, peppermints and Jujubes.)</span><span class="line">Maybe this is why I’m so mad at the Universe—</span></p>
<p><span class="line">because all it has ever wanted, this Universe</span><span class="line">that gave me life, fed me from its breast til I was two,</span><span class="line">and even before that, made a place in which I could be—</span><span class="line">all it’s wanted was for me to take the sixteen</span><span class="line">steps to sobriety, fold the Eight-Fold Path over yesterday</span><span class="line">and step around it lightly, as I would an exercise ball,</span></p>
<p><span class="line">but the problem is, dear Universe, there’s no way I could be</span><span class="line">something as hard as all that, to wake up yesterday</span><span class="line">morning, stretch over my sixteen selves, bound out like a ball.</span></p>
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