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---
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
|
