At 38

The movie The Great Escape plays perpetually

an empty screen playing my heart,

a fixed portrait of childhood

here I am waiting anxiously

for a youthful Steve McQueen to grace

across

my teenage hormones on his motorcycle

Jack Lemmon still lives in the apartment

passing his key to the executives,

standing out in the rain until everyone

has gone.

I stand out in the rain too,

until this place is exorcised

cluttered with the things I was unwilling

to leave behind

I memorized Shirley MacLaine's part,

with aplomb

the naive girl stuck loving the older

married man,

hating herself

attempting suicide as an interruption

to get rid of the ugly girl no one but Jack

could love

waiting for a consummation that

never happens,

entering middle age with lots of red streaks,

lik red ink for all the answers that were

wrong

I want the bad memories to be cut out on

some editor's floor,

the good memories to be videos on an

oak stained book shelf

somewhere

so I can find the sanity I must have

misplaced

so I can rummage through this mess I

have made,

that has become a great junk pile that has

become deeper with time

I need Steve's rebellious smirk, it meant

I was safe,

the little girl who still slept between her

parents,

the partition separating their anger,

but the walls of my flesh were paper thin,

and I should have been a sponge to

absorb their animosity,

I demand my youth back

the perpetual smile that would never age,

if I could have saved the images of my

mother and father

under the same roof,

drinking life through the same straw,

now how do I keep my body in one piece?

when they went in separate directions

one day

the experience of their divorce sawed me

across the waist,

and my center floated away,

the umbilical cord escaped me

the universe became this long dark road

without any choices,

At 38, I crash landed into this aging

body,

the years spiraling out of control,

I rushed through the atmosphere,

a meteor, too fast to have actually lived,

to this present hour I write,

people don't believe that the slower time

moves

the faster the hours actually go,

running us up to catch the destinations of

the others

How do I escape this old woman?

who worked too diligently in corrupting

herself with sharp objects,

I did it to prove that I was here,

like mutilating a tree to mark the places I

had been,

and I want to travel back into the obscure

cell of my childhood,

to squeeze through the bars that rusted on

my flesh,

these bars I wear across my arms like

Holocaust numbers

and I must shed them,

but I must not shed them.

Sometimes the illusion is living like that

being shifted from prison to prison

from doorway to doorway,

exchanging one prison set of clothes for

another,

it is one incarceration upon another,

an on-going sentence for crimes I wasn't

aware I had committed

I'll try to lead you through the stripes

which have become twisted roads inside,

the occupied places guarded by

barking dogs

and barbed wire,

the extreme ghettos that hide so well they

are invisible,

and the edges I worked so hard in

sculpting

now are so severe they cut every day,

and I don't bleed anymore,

bleeding is for amateurs,

and once you learn how to acupuncture

yourself all the time,

a sort of anesthesia finds you and rolls

through the veins most of the days

with or without your consent you sleep

walk through living to avoid it

The world has become numb,

because its become stilled,

and the prayers believers like me recite

the words that never get to God's ear,

but stay stranded on the tongue

burning with the things you don't want

Him to hear or know,

and the blank pages of a file you

wandered the globe to throw away

the identity you gave to some ostrich

who buried its head to keep you obscure

and the eyes behind houses are always

watching you,

and upon trees and rocks always judging

the secrets intended for God,

the constant prayers whose urgency has

become steep,

steep mountains to overcome,

and the years become deeper and more

mysterious

until every man is an ocean,

a turbulent host to a myriad of storms

rushing to embrace anybody's body

and nobody's

these brief affairs that come as waves

crashing

those momentary encounters that beat

the shoreline,

regrettably unable to return to itself,

I can't go back there yet I must

But you continue to keep the stranger

beings beneath the surface,

hugging vigorously the thorns that have

become an abusive spouse,

my scabby knees have passed on its

splinters

onto my hands as children,

and children born into such unions are

scissors in the womb,

learning that pointed personalities

control their parents,

and my child has learned domination as

an art,

the unlucky genes some families are born

into

those cursed people like generational

werewolves,

and the children born into "sideshow"

the ones termed "freaks,"

the ones left behind in their cages

understand,

and look out into the apathy of the

crowds,

and the well-meaning gazers who poke

their broken wands

through the bars to examine us,

And I have taken my cage around with

me everywhere,

afraid to abandon it,

as a close relative,

as a lover,

full of memories

rich with its own baggage,

and the cage is like a concierge,

preventing death from taking my room

away

at night I curl up with a two-liter diet

Pepsi as a bottle of rum,

to suck on the plastic as a nipple,

I am vigilant,

an owl in a tree,

breathing in a forest to keep from going

extinct,

I cut out hours as pictures to bury in an

album

as a shallow grave to say good-bye,

without having to break out of this cage,

as a womb,

without being flushed out again,

I sit still as an aging embryo,

an unborn fetus awaiting execution

my eyes shut tight to avoid the sterile

scissors

that won't let my body pass,

I lay down of the floor of this body

clinging to it,

as I would my mother's pregnant waist

until God has pulled me out with the

forceps

that scarred my skull,

and now thick hair like a forest raining

over the mistakes

my parents have made

At 38, my curves have lost their razor

edges,

my hips more swollen and round like

pieces of fruit

having lost its urges,

having knifed me like grapes from a vine,

and I lay sprawled out learning what a

raisin knows

losing the enthusiasm and fresh vigor of

youth,

my body has passed so many truths,

20 lbs. have not kept me warmer

than the skinny woman who owned a rib

cage only a year and a half ago.

(Taken from The Girl and Other Poems by Matty B. Duran for sale on Amazon.com)