Penitentiary pals S.W.A.K.

We've been In(ti)mate(s) for a while now, half through,

you’d think after all this time we'd be better friends.

I know, It’s not easy, accepting one's flaws, accentuating the positive attributes, letting failures and ugliness go out the barred window with the subjective death row sentence, the brutality of mortality!

Learning to like yourself shouldn’t be detention, but feels like incarceration I hazard to guess. We are all pre-loaded with the operational software to love ourselves. It comes out as algorithmic survival, a defense mechanism, calculating but unaware. And even self-destruction is a necessary part of self-love. 

Oh, liking oneself is much more complex, if we are to be completely honest with ourselves. 

I cannot stand looking in the mirror, and do so hopefully only twice a day, like brushing my teeth. In fact, that is when I do it, and neither are pleasurable to me. 

My lips specifically have abandoned me. They were never really there from the first word. I was designed for listening. Unable to wear lipstick, nobody can read my lips. This is my silver lip lining. 

And I am deathly jealous of the red, blood and bright, dark and demure…the quiver, the nibble...mesmerizing lips. 

These luscious sets are second best to the eyes, but one is more confident with lies. And I prefer the naked truth.

I feel pretty when my brain fits just right.

My hands have no fingertips. On some of the fingers anyway. 

I have burnt them off learning how to love with food over the years.

Now I can get away with murder. 

As with a pianist, one would think my hands are precious to me, I look at these often. No, they are not pretty either. I don’t like manicures. My nails are usually short, trim and nude and crude extensions for me. 

Occasionally I will paint them and it makes me like my hands for a bit-until the paint chips-which is instantaneous. As you can guess, painting my nails feels fruitless, like dusting and TV.

These are just the top coats of course, exterior paint. The interior is my sanctuary.

Find your voice. Use your voice. That’s the voice. No, it never sounds the same when it comes out. Do you like your voice? Mine sounds like someone took a vagrant identity and slapped it in my body.  And yet I love when people speak poetry, like French and Italian, it moves me out of body.  A way out of my personal prison of personality, pseudo-sounding reality-purportedly, yet we are all trapped on our islands of I and should be kind to the natives who were there before you decided to ‘arrive’.

Since we are cell mates, I just had to say, I have no intention of biting the hand that feeds me.  

Please pardon me-

I am sorry, 

I am famished, but I still do not like me.  

Image of Miss Kate Heffelfinger, 1917[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Trust the time (saving daylight)

Back some time ago, when my two kids were young and restless, I guess I was also young and restless and a bit resentful of the requisite donation of time, the endless giving of time, my time for others. But I now know those times I gave my time to my children were among the most precious times I have been present for.
Being in the Now of then is still with me, even now. Some of the accuracy of memory has blurred, those times I meant to lose, the times I drank to escape facing time. All the time...

Before my kids were wise enough to have learned not to trust everything I say as truth, they believed in the concept of certainties.
Children need this.
As they say, there are some things that remain certain, like death-which is time, and taxes-which is the burden of money, both are binding.
My son would rely on one clock. The clock on the microwave in the kitchen was like the sun for him, and even then he was a live-life-by-the-(exact)-minute kind of guy, meaning take a shower at 6:48, anything else considered late, he believed he was contributing to the order of things.
One specific night I remember wanting to escape all my obligations in order to drink.
I changed the clock on the microwave, I stole an hour of his life that night so he and my daughter would go to bed and I could be left alone in silence.
He should have learned to never trust the time.
One night, at some time in the future, he will find this out and come to collect an hour of my time, with interest accrued in the past.
I will tell him, these are the good times that never last.
And he will be counting the seconds until he will be left alone in silence, sooner rather than later.
Time flies, they say, but sometimes jumps ahead, like today, when we Spring forward and agree to donate an hour of our time until we Fall back,
into precious memories like these.




Image of painting by Hugó Poll, Sunset (1914), [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Infinity and Eternity (i.e.)

Infinity and Eternity

Conjoined at the lips, a syne of the Times, in synonyms, and hymns, chants and rants, examples and alternates, in lieu of, in-loo-of-in-loove.

Such As:

Infinity-id (not ego) ergo and beyond

(i.e.)

Super-ego is immense, less intense is the boundless continuum of you through ubiquity, perpetually in perpetuity with gratuity for the endless expanse of space, the vastness of immeasurability, like possibility. Infinity stretches is reckless abandon in multitudinous arrays, a myriad of mathematical signs like circles and eights so we can relate in order to create what we think will last for-ever.

∞

Eternity –est (not established or capital) on Eastern Standard Time

(i.e.)

Once in a blue moon occurring into infinitude aglow over the wild blue yonder where kingdom come and afterlife are everlasting aeons, endless ages charted on times line without end, immortal and immune, orbiting the obituaries and scary to see the face of our race never noticing the striking resemblance of Us, reaching the finish line, it’s ray projecting what will come beyond what we can see, the isthmus between now and then when sometimes and anon mingle, mix and blend times blurry end . 

±

Image byYehuda Pen [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons Clock-maker (1914).