Prose Poetry

Jimmy Legs in a constricting pose on a flattened mattress with her knee caught between her teeth, she rumbles up the sheets, four fingers and a thumb closed in a fist. She snaps her toes to a rhythm, a crawling beat up the burned walls, up the smoke stained Nipple Light on the ceiling. 

Behind a pair of scotch taped glasses are eyes claimed to be upside down, an optic nerve as thick as a pencil, an iris assumed brown, but actually a grey, a dark grey, an almost black. The pupil fades into the dark and you can never tell what she's really looking at. 

Jimmy Legs is not anything you'd assume. The way we toss half-formed lumps of people into boxes so they can try to find shape. Your inability to do so for her makes her a being without a box. Imagine the relief of stretching without fear of slamming your elbow on a cardboard corner. 

Jimmy Legs knows, and she’s even mobile while sleeping. 

Jimmy Legs is out in the deep dark, out past the working street lights and paved paths. Her heels sink into the mud, strands of tall grass scratch her naked calf, her thighs burn while wrapped secure around the base of a tree, face pressed against soggy bark, dribbling of soaked leaves plop to the dirt. 

In this rain, the trees open their mouths and release a moaning. They rearrange her thoughts, creating crushed folds of underdeveloped ideas under scolding eyes that just hate us. They tell truths that sound like lies if the little person inside has died. 

Jimmy Legs is tragic, a dry throat wheezing through puffs of nicotine, gently pounding out beats on the last book on the tallest stack of books seated on the floor of the room. She’s resting, unwillingly resting on thoughts that screw her perception, her usual desire to veg-out with the rest of us. The thoughts cake up her pores, rub out in flakes on melted bars of Irish Spring, turn to scum on the side of the tub. 

I’m left with the gushing blood of the bite in the arm I tried consoling her with, the shattered spikes of wood sticking from the door she broke while slamming her way through it. She’s wasted another moment where something could be happening, and the restless twisting of her ankles makes me nervous. Jimmy Legs could go anytime now

…she could go now.

My life became his image pasted against the walls of my mind, a job done in haste leaving bulging drips of white paste drooling over the thin scraps, my days and nights were this wonderfully tragic individual, running my fingers over the damp swells of paper distorting the blank gaze of those bowler hat eyes. I would sit, analyze, and unravel the shell of red and green cottons, until there was nowhere else to look. 

I’d tell everyone otherwise, not bringing him up, not gasping or flinching at the sound of his name…not showing a sudden interest in his interest in an attempt to make them my own. 

No, I’d never enjoy this song,
No, I’d never watch this film,
No I’d never read this book. 

These are all true, but for now they’re all I have to get closer to him. 

Flipping through records in a CD shop, I feel a sensation overwhelm me when I see the band I’ve forever related to him ever since I heard him say he liked it alright. This sensation that I felt is undetectable at that moment as I didn’t feel any guilt just then. I went on about daily events, parties, dinners, stories, jokes…again and again I recalled my daily ongoing until my throat was parched and no one was interested in hearing more, but of course these things I do aren’t as satisfying as they’d probably be if I witnessed him there…sat where our knees could momentarily brush. 

Knowing is not the same as experience, hearing but not feeling…experiencing. I was overwhelmed…it was just so incomplete. I emptied myself, clawed out the flesh of who I once was to make room for him, swallowed him whole, squeezed my lips shut to keep him back, hold him down, devour him, digest him…and one day, become him. 

That evening the grey clouds drooled rain onto the earth, the sticky dribbling like hollow thuds in my ear. I closed my eyes under the deep darkness…focusing. I felt my fallopian tubes crumbling into my ovaries, the vagina canal folding its way out. My womb deflates into a mass of soft, runny refuse pouring from the open hole as the vagina canal pokes its way through dropping the ovaries behind, underneath they stay incased in raison-like skin sprouting black curls. 

Under my bra there was a sudden sucking, my breast each squeezing their way back inside, first left, then right…the sound piercing like a wail, a stinging pain making me nauseous, I swallow back floods of warm, salty saliva watching as my nipples shrink into dime sized spots right against my hollow chest. Eventually, my body expelled jelly-like globs of purple clots clinging to crescent shaped slivers of pink and red all slimy between my fingers, all leaking a light waterish fluid when I squeezed them. Through my mouth these chunks of flesh came tumbling, sloshing in the toilet bowl. My lungs collapsed into deflated balloons and my stomach wrenched inside me, evacuating the last remnants of my womanhood…it was almost too simple.

I wash away the excess and study my new sex, rigid under the sting of scolding hot water spraying from the showerhead. My fingers gentle glide against the skin is not the same as it was with my other sex, no mucousy fluid pumping out onto my curious fingers, no scent of spice fuming up to my nose when I sit. I stare at it, my hand resting on it through jeans that don’t feel the same any more. 

I run for the night, through the sparks of lightning flickering above the tower tops. My legs stronger and leaner, lighter and lifting me above the rippling puddles of rain water hugging the curbs. I dash like a deer, seeking him, momentarily searching out my reflection in display windows of the stores I pass. I see myself hovering, glowing in the street lights. I see heads turning and jaws dropping. I feel their inspiration flourish inside them…works of wonder inspired by the sight of me. At the end of the street I see him and he’s finally seeing me.

When I took a step toward him, and when his eyes came to look into mine, everything vanished around us. Empires rose and fell, humanity evolved way beyond expectation. I watched his fingers turn to three, turn to one, turn to none. I watched his hair sink lower and lower and lower until his skull exposed itself from beneath his skin. I watched his teeth shrink into his gums, and his gums melt into his lips, shutting them, fracturing his cigarette. I watched the egg white goo of his eyes pouring from their sockets, frozen to the hollow of his cheeks. There he remained, a mass of flesh with wire-like bone piercing through.

While I spoke to him, I could hear my words stumbling into each other, constantly apologizing and then turning away, forehead to the drywall. He didn't have one word for me. Somewhere in those closely sectioned eyes I receive a shock, an abrupt dip below frozen water.

I felt him slipping and I couldn’t make my grip any tighter, blood sprouted from my raw ravaged knuckles, his flesh bubbling between my fingers in pink puffs. I could feel my back twist, and suddenly my weight dropped on top of me, 150 lost pounds regained slamming down on my head, packed like paste against paper was the fat under my skin. My once surefooted stance replaced with the stumbling foolishness of my own feet. I collapse, his body tossed with the instant my fingers slip off him. I watch in terror, unable to stand, the weight heavy on my chest, I watch as he vanishes, dissolving back into the crowded streets of the city, carrying his whole self back to his own life…and leaving me hollow and confused.

So long from my own self I can’t recall how things work, I spend hours before mirrors grasping at my bloated gut, my large heavy breast, my cunt prickly with days-since-shaved pubic hair. My legs, so thick I can barely lift them as I walk to and from places I feel I’ve never been to, new images and smells travel through my brain, placed with old yellowing Polaroid’s of my face alongside these places. I can’t imagine why being in such areas would beg my return, but while there my thoughts of him run like water colors in wisps that fade…

I’m drowning in the space surrounding the space I take up. 

Breath catches in the center of my chest, the weight of the pressure stopping my heart, I’m nearing collapse. I’m suffocating in the massive empty, so close to death my eyes are blinded. It weighs me down, reaching before me my hands barely able to sweep around, hoping for something solid to hold on to. 

I try to hold on to anything, a minute a moment a hand so warm and smooth but almost too smooth, slipping through mine, always slipping just too soon, leaving me in black…

…and then there’s yours, large and stiff, thumb and index finger nearly ripping my hand from my wrist, my head snaps back with the tug of my arm pulling me hard into your chest. Where are you walking? My foot constantly finds itself sinking into your footprints, following lightly, slowly…but following still. 

I find my eyes sliding gently against the things you might have looked at, in my mirror, that soft eyed girl whose face you pressed your palm against, that first time feeling someone feeling her. It stuck inside, compressing organs to bone to muscle till it was hard to breathe, till all I wanted during those moments with your mouth to mine was to swallow you down, squeeze you into the narrow space inside. 

Side by side you press your sharp hip to my waist, hand on my shoulder, pulling my ear to your lips, every word you say wets my mouth with desire, to climb into the fantasy world you design, the one that of course seems so much more than mine, blinding neon colors, thick sweet air, soft edges. 

I lay awake and stare at your quiet lips and quiet eyes, white sheets bulking around your limbs, coating you as though you were lying on a cloud, something ethereal, something unnatural… 

Your face is a mudslide, trickling down the skull, appearing to pour very slowly into a prominent chin. The tiny strands of hair thickly clotted at the bottom of your face strangely gives you a youthful appearance. 

Your eyes are large, ovular bulges of clear white and deep brown and the lashes on the lids that cover them curl at long lengths against the rims. Your full lips are a dark purple, grasping every lick of lips seated relaxed below your nose. Your voice is slow measured steps treading gently against the ear. A reaction, a slamming of nerve endings against the flesh, a trembling, goosebumps and pulsating and what you say…

It’s something like magic, like a knowledge of what to do to pull the secret person out of me. She leaps in anticipation, posing nude before you, bare and vulnerable, but comforted by your gaze, no fear is felt, insecurities melted down and puddled at the feet. 

There’s a fairytale in this, a painfully bright glow that bleaches everything else, so all you’ll ever see will be stained from the burn on your retinas. Maybe that’s why specific signals and warnings were missed, half her sight is blown out by that fantasy, by a hope that the dull, monochromatic shades of reality will line up with it; a glowing life and a glowing soul combine. 

There’ll never be a world more worth living in than the one colored with the aura of another

But, when filtered through the years she’s lived those hazy dreams related in quick sentences, vague images, the sincere desire to possess such a thing are muted by her drowsy delivery on the lip of her apartment bathtub, the burning end of her cigarette directed toward the cracked window, elbows kneading into her chubby thighs…how detached she seems from it all, like she’s explaining how to tie shoelaces rather than the reason she held on to these partnerships that ended so sourly.

No matter how the package arrives, true happiness, genuine bliss can’t be sown and harvested; it shows up like a storm, blustering in when you’re unprepared, vulnerable to every element, sweeping in with the careless slap of beach slipper foam on his callused heel harmonizing with her measured rubber sneaker sole squeaks, just a half-second behind each other so you can’t tell who’s leading and who’s following. Steps that punch the floor underfoot, determined, hasty under the fluorescent buzz of hotel hallways. 

Any outsider watching as his arm, spindly and lazy, pulls her just below his pits by the curve of her waist, would think this coupling was many years old, that she was already gone, her warm, summer colors far ahead of his wintry solid shades. But between the two of them, these mismatch prints and clashing palettes create a dewy sweet pop masterpiece, breathily cooed through the glossed lips of a wide-eyed songstress. Every time their eyes connect, a smile is shared like an inside joke many decades old, still as side-splitting as the first time. 

Their forks met when neither needed to be raised, only a back just as damp in exhaustion to lean against, to catch their breath. A step out of the line of reality, between the mirror and the reflection, where careless joys can be guiltlessly indulged. Careless joys in the shape of squares, rectangles, triangles, ovals, perfect circles…springs thrusting their bodies always upward, high to higher, hand in hand, battling gravity and winning every bout. 

You're never changed by a person you love. If anything, parts inside of which you'd never engaged with leap to the front of the line. A roaming itch beneath the skin, the muscle...rabid cawing that reverberates from the spongy marrow of your bones. The ferrell recklessness that lives in the peripheral but is never clearly seen, never sought. 

And yet here it was, tickled out of her from the siren song that oozes painfully from the sorrowful look in his eyes. Dancing to dirges, skiing on thin ice... They might forget more than they learn from all of this, it could mean nothing at all, these days leaping across that invisible line in the blurry, deliriously joyful state in which they stand together, in the dull glow of beige hotel lamp light, newly disrobed, blissfully floating in a new kind of high. 

In her retrospection, between inhales of the quickly burning marlboro, the sudden blasting run of the toilet across from her repose, the only way their paring made sense had to be an agreement from the other side. All the embraces proceeding their reconnection were only soften the blow of whomever they became the last time they ended. 

A soul contract.

So many closed roads ahead, they stand at eachothers side, a sympathetic hand resting on their shoulders, they turn to each others faces, big bright eyes lined with sorrow, glossy layers of hidden tears sinking into cherub cheeks. What was the start? When did that glow of anticipation turn into a turn toward an ominous end? When did they lose that hope to drive them, that desire to want? When did it turn out this way? 

They hear the call of nothing to wait for in the whistling of silence, echoing even when surrounded by loud, they see the devestated future in the pinhole light at the end of a darkened tunnel, the roar of a unavoidable crash behind them, something from the past, always building up speed, splintering their brain until they can’t even feel a sense that they can get past it. 

So when did it happen? 

They’re stuck in what already happened, fingernails clenched between teeth as they stare blankely ahead. They turn toward each other, eyes dipping up from a lowered head. 

“Do you remember…?”

It’s double their weight the whips that wrap around them, the boom of sharp stabbing words, the tickle in the throat of those who’s index fingers found a way to point toward them, the disregard of their humanity, the sinking sense of their own found inhumanity. The way the back curves into a hunch, a hidden self…and always hiding, they always hide. They aren’t sure why, but they feel as though they’re hiding something and nothing at all. 

The hand on the shoulder is faintly felt as they haven’t the means to save each other, let alone themselves, but the mututal disdain is what drives their closeness, their spiritual turn toward each other, arms clasped and held around each other, tears dripping into shoulders and chests, their together in this war against their own being, their own need to exist outside of what their existance could never mean, which is anything. 

So when did it happen? 

 We want them to let it go, to dig a hole similar to ours and bury it, cover it in self medication, drown it out, hold it in, forgive. 

But who are they forgiving? It always feels like they have to forgive themselves, but the roar behind them halts the sense that it was never their fault, and the sensation is too much to ignore, and so they can’t. They lived safe inside the cell, but in the darkness surrounding them, they saw their own special hell. How do they depend on something they can’t seem to find, hands blindly flailing before them, trying to find something stable to hold onto, and all they found was encapsulation, imprisonment…

And so they ran.

Nervous chuckles bursting in white air from their open throats as they rush out of that hell. Rubber sneaker soles slip on ice covered road and the thrill of escape causing hearts to beat with passion…maybe its true, that things can be left behind, that new surroundings bring new emotions, ones outside the ones they’re used to, ones to bring that smile back in their eyes. 

They’re not afraid, they’ve been afraid too long and it was time to face the fear, but not really. They were aware the fear was where they were, and they felt inside they were stong enough to endure, they didn’t have anything to run from…but something to run to. 

Freedom. They felt freedom for the first time, the arms inside open wide and they feel the lift of flight, the drop of baggage and the crash of their weight breaking the ground below. The pinhole suddenly closer, the hope a warming relaxation through the flesh. They didn’t worry, for what they went through, this blindness they were facing was worth it, wanted, needed.