anna

I think about my grandmother more than i like to admit. The one six ft under since before my dad was old enough to understand object permanence. And long before he was old enough to know what it was to want to die. I wish i could have known her. It feels foreign to name her grandmother. When maybe she would have liked the familiarity of another name. Or maybe she would have been so bitter from so many years of holding on. That she couldnt see another batch of children born. And be so afraid that shed take herself away from them.

I wonder if she would have minded that im gay. I like to think she’s me though. And maybe both her sons had more gay kids than straight because she had to hide. And maybe she is in all of us much more than well ever know. Sometimes I swear I feel her tugging.

But ive seen a mothers tears. As her own blood was lowered into the ground. Though i couldnt say whether there was any blood left in him. After what he did. Or if all that red had turned to grief. And it would have been easy to see selfish. Carved across the wood. Pouring from the lines on his fathers face. And sealed with the grease from his ex lovers hair. Which used to bounce as if it lived, I could see salt water pooling in her cheeks at night…

But who can be blamed for scratching an itch. The most colossal itch. And you wouldnt yell at a child with chicken pox. Aching burning with need. And i scratch tiny bits of relief from my skin. The murder of skin cells to satiate. But nothing like the small death my pills repress. Like any relief, the aftermath leaves guilty marks. Like masturbating beside a beautiful girl because youre not meant to touch. Some acts are already so far intimate. Guilt will spill from your cunt

And over your fingers. And you, me, ill want to marvel that im wet. But maybe it’s made from all my sickness. Or maybe it’s there to remind me i can burn through all my skin. Thinking ill hit some final release. But its only muscle and blood and fat and bones

And shit and piss and fluids

And im not made of a badness that can be surgically removed. Cauterised. I want to follow my grandmother. But i dont want to leave two aching kids. Who wont know theyre mother left them till well into their 20s. And all i can do with her life is tell the doctors. That maybe my aches. And penchant for morbidity

Comes down to genetics.

violentwavesofemotion:

“During the rainstorms of April the oyster rises from the sea and opens its shell – rain enters it – when it sinks the raindrops become the pearl. So take a picnic, open your body, and give birth to pearls.”

— Anne Sexton, from The Complete Poems; “The Sermon of the Twelve Acknowledgments,”