A dozen winters,,,

The heater is ringing. The electricity is humming. The bed is breaking. The floor is a flood. Objects water-logged and tarnished. Just things. Why should she care? They don't breathe. Now, they don't exist. Her comforts are snaking away from her:  a socio-pathological tint of green. The green slips like silk and thorns; out the cracks into the cold dark-time air; out the creases of her estranged family's worry. The girl will be fine. They don't believe her. She can hear a beautiful song start to mist up the tired air; it only tells her to live, to endure. How come no one else can see the double-barrel hole through her chest, the microscope-view, untethered scrutiny, the epitome of hollow. Can you see through her into the dirt? The flowers lay the way lovers do after intensity. Fragrant. Lazy. Blurred with a wave of thrush. Six feet, a pit of dirt, ugly dirt, the kind that mummifies and strangles...and the heater. It rings. Hum. Hum. Hum. The beautiful song melts her ears awkwardly. The song glues itself into her person and eases the decay, the fright, the strain. Let it. Let it. The room full of rubbish is actually quite vacant. The trash masquerades what her jaw cannot move; to have movement, to have speech, it is not automatic; it is hindered by weight and the weight is the rubbish that could not be taken to the street side due to a self-induced coma: she allows herself one or two comas a month because  lull, the sleep does, lull: it disguises the tradition of loneliness. How else could she get through? How else survive the sheath of dense aphotic cloaked about her paralyzed face-how the dense aphotic clogs up her airways and makes things stranger and harder and less life-like, but, what? Does she live it or think it or dream it?  No one, ever, shall know. This is her cross. All of them with aching joints carry the cross. It is heavy, more heavy than the burden stupid Atlas mythically, and oh so like a martyr, must bear. The circle. The relentless call of Ophelia. But, she is not Ophelia. She is herself all mummified and without thought or direction...a slip of the tray breaks the crystal tumblers and the horror of. the aftermath , the disconcertion, nudges her raft enough to be made to float without direction into an ocean no other has claimed. Nor should they acknowledge its aimless gesture. Peacefully, gently, the song, floating and impossible to capture,  the slow stream-line away, the great Indian-giver, mortality. As all this passes, she is at ease, quite like a groggy marionette. Let them pull and pull....she will cave in and follow. It does not matter anymore what is right or wrong. These things happen. So what if it is misfortune? It is all the same now or never, now or later: endurance cannot succeed the human condition. They ceased to perceive her perceptions- ghastly real only to her. We are all given the gift of reality and it sometimes causes us to lose credibility if it not match what he or she and ten thousand others claim it to be. What they see. What they cannot see. Flesh can touch flesh and yet be one million miles away, pressing into the cement of some remote pillar that upholds a watercolor bridge. It can be anything that you or she or he will never witness, but alone and without witness. Slowly the pillar weakens due to some mistake; a mistake only a human can make. And the bridge falls away before she could hold fast to their hands as they reached out with no choice but to give in due to their limitations-the gape was too wide. When all hope bleeds out the body and forms a thick puddle of sludge on her pretty and expensive shoes, will she have the strength to clean up the loss? Certainly with no blood one cannot survive. Not a human was built to survive the absence of its nectar. The pump of the heart and the pulse of the veins is essential to sustain such a breed. The Human. And human she was. That is until the clamps were placed over her mouth, but gently, gently tightening the screws. She will learn pain the gentle way, the cruelest way, and have no voice to capture her monsters-to expel and relieve the grime that corrodes her nature. They stay in. They stay in and sneak dialogue, the nature converses with the iniquity; the dialogue becomes a desperate peal, agonizing for mother, for father, for sister, brother, but the sounds she makes terrifies them, and they in their helplessness cannot perceive anything familiar, cannot recognize the foreign creature she has been forced into by God knows what indignity. They have to put the monster in its cage so as to avoid harm. Harm to herself or others. But, no, no, no, no, she does not want to commit violence: why then does she commit such violence. The confusion and the buried human suffocate in a self that is no longer a self. The self has become the monster by some freak of  brain chemistry all wrongly routed  into a wretched display of  imbalance, discordance and ill-fortune, bad genetics, hell-hounds. She becomes a hostage before their very eyes: a stranger, a beast. But if only she could learn to beat the dialogue of iniquity that sullies the good, the natural, the her; she must be able to in order to survive. She has learned inside the cages, claustrophobic endless sterile walls and sick rooms, that this only instigates the monster, strengthens the stranger. kidnaps the psyche, and oh hell does come pouring out her every orifice, spraying the natural prescriber's, doctors, nurses, garbage mental health workers, with a plasma thick and ill. She is no longer one of them. She has become ostracized and brainwashed wit terrible trances. They see an animal. Get it in the claustrophobic, sanitary, scum-fucked sick room before it makes anymore mess. Inside the cage her joints start to burn and twist, infected, perverted painfully abnormal stretches and strains, the joints grind in terror of the air becoming too thick to breathe and the cage too small to move and the relentless infestation of her physique more uncompliant and betraying her grace, her lips spread across her face: it is now time for the fetal position to mask the discomfort of the reckless forces that compromise and control, any sense of what used to be human has left her. So strong is the monster. So sudden. So much like an enemy inside of her, rotting her, abandonment of essential self-care and hygiene insignificant and abandoned. The film on her teeth and the crud on her lips grotesque and exaggerated. A stranger. A foreigner. A grime beyond recognition. She has gone. Tired. Too tired and bitter self-betrayal like a wrecking ball destroy her willingness to fight. She goes into a coma. Self-induced. A new trick to outwit the monster. In sleep she can find freedom and nothingness. A state of bliss much like a weapon. Not being. Not existing. Sleep as self-medication for a week and escape the prison with relentless rage she learns to stand up again and become motivated as if in a fight for survival....slip through the cracks, not missed. The rats all resemble each other. Surely one will not be missed. The air is so thick and she presses against it full-force. Where is the exit? All doors and hallways and rat infested sickness like a montage of no escape. There has to be a way out. They cannot help her. They can only haunt her with large sums of money she cannot afford, and for what? Does it make sense to be in a cage of sick animals and ominous environment? Will she benefit? No. No she will not. It is not her fault. Every monster is unique and must be treated according to the rule of the individual. For each of us have our own set of rules. And they make sense. Right? They make sense and she must barrel through the adversaries that keep her sickness well fed. She is not bad. She is fighting to relieve herself of the additional stress of inadequate treatment as it only makes her ache and drool like the plague. Somewhere in the remote regions of her psyche she can see the dim sane light of hope trying to free itself from the monsters greed and instruct her back to shelter. She attempts to slip past them, as if invisible, but their eyes, too gargantuan, ridicule her back, down, down, into the pit of white hard homely bright tormenting capsule of solitude. She hates the noises. The gnawing and shuffling and disruption of the sick. Pierces her ears, they do. The best idea she has to relieve herself of their persistent bitching is to focus on digging her nails deep into her face and across, and across, until her face is demarcated and the swell takes her focus off the suffocation of idiots and tyrants and sick fuck you mothers. Her reality is distorted by the screaming brain. Stranger brain. Screw up brain. All is a deluge and it cracks and knocks and the stinging of her raw face and oh what has she done! The nurses scurry in their annoyed way to fix their paws on some medicated toxicated gauze that burns like lemon-drops and oh she must stay for at least six weeks just look at her. Oh, and remember, no smoking. Hence her nails become breakfast lunch and dinner until there is only raw skin to gnaw at....at least a goddamn cigarette. The walls leer and laugh at her with their fluorescent putridity. Fetal position. Self-induced coma. Where are you Sister Morphine? She does not care anymore. The apathy disease has been added to the sick-package. She wants to let go. She prays for someone to kill her or to die in her sleep. Help. Help. She laughs idly at the thought of a receiving voice, a fairy fuckity angel to hear her desperate, pathetic....help me, help me. Silence. Sink into the hated white walls and their bright bitching. "Please" she says. "Please let the sleep come....the coma....the death...the end of this. No more.   ...A Dozen Winters..