Day Of The Bed

Live out the days. That's what it turns into. Do the time, try to get the breaths to match. Alone at night where it's all true, one contemplates the wound from which they came. The mother/father wound, the girlfriend/boyfriend wound, the husband/wife wound, everybody's got one. Some might think they have none. Some might think they have many. But there's only one. And it got you where you are right now. You can go to meetings, sing songs and read books, but self-help is always about someone else. You can lean on them, groove on their wound, but then you got to split back to your own self-examination pit. Because two wounds will never do. Two wounds can never be one. And a room full of people is a room full of wounds. It hurts to be around unfamiliar pain. It's like a beating from a stranger. Humanity: it pains and wounds. It separates us from the rest of the breathing things. And every kid you see, you wanna warn somehow, but there's nothing to say. Either they have their wound already, or it's coming along soon enough. We are such horrible and neurotic things, and nothing keeps us in line. Not cops, God, money, love or death. Because the wound is there. And it just waits until you've stopped talking and looking around to say "You're done here. Let's go." The wound is always right about that. What I would give for anonymous woundless nights. Not just ones with my back turned to it. There have been some good illusory nights. There were women. We played with each others' wounds, and both thought we got the better part of the other. But you know that one. It's just sad distraction, and sanctioned cruelty. A mutually agreed upon brutality. I think some of the saddest moments of my life have been spent with my face in some woman's neck, pushing away, going nowhere. Two people getting together to do this is poison dripping from a bare bulb, in a rent-by-the-week/by-the-month semi-furnished room. Micro dramas of the wounded play out. If I told you I loved you, walked 100 miles to hear you say my name, ate 10 pounds of sand, bled from my eyes, would you take the wound away? When I envision the bullet crashing through my skull, I wonder if there would be a second between its exit and mine where I would feel unwounded. I wonder what that impossible-to-reach world would be like to live in, and if I could somehow squeeze a compressed and ecstatic lifetime into that fraction of a second. Without the wound, I would be nobody nowhere - without sorrow, without a song. My paint would run dry, my blood would thicken, and my words would be ash falling back into the mouth of a dead volcano. Years ago I went out with a woman who only enjoyed sex in a few positions. Memories of her uncle ruined the rest. Every once in a while, she'd stop me and say "Nope, that's too much like my uncle", and usually we would stop. It was very sad. We would lie still for a while and then go to sleep. I just wish there was a way around it all as years pass and perception grows more exacting and truths more inescapable. I pull myself through time season by season. In autumn, I tell myself to keep going until spring. In spring, I tell myself that autumn will be beautiful. I graffiti the wound with a smile, and every now and then it sticks for a while. But only because I see yours.