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.