EN 3240

# 31.

I am a puzzle being pulled apart, I am a sandcastle slowly sloughing away
I am lost in a world several sizes too big and when I reach out,
I can’t feel the walls, I can’t feel the walls,
Where are the walls, where are the walls, where am I?
I have lived in an iron lung but I loved it but I left it
I have made it this far pushing up, pushing through, avid-eyed and resolute
And now you are the proffered apple of my peril.

My world is textbook definitions, my world is medical presciptions, it is linear, it is monochromatic, or was;
It is familiar interdictions, it is neat organizations, it is sorting everything into black and white
I am a sage and a mother, always right; I am a scholar, quoting my books
And you are a sullen teenager, mocking my rules,
Loathing my complacency,
Running gleefully roughshod through my pretty world
like a child
with a needle
in a roomful of balloons.

I have arachnophobia, I have a fear of the foreign, of the alien and unknown, of eight superfluous eyes,
of rigid, jointed legs, of a mechanical fashion of moving – not pretty, but efficient,
like a tank or a robot; of evil, surreptitious machinations,
of the facelessness, the soullessness, the silence of spider’s eyes and spider’s legs
but I love spiderweb, the way it wavers in the wind, its lovely, fragile charm,
the way it pulls me in closer, like fire,
until I start back, looking for the spider.
And in my new world several sizes too big there are spiderwebs everywhere and I love it
Except that they all have spiders somewhere and I see them if I look.
And all of this is nothing to you,
there is nothing unfamiliar to you, nothing novel to you,
nothing to react to,
all of this is so long ago that you can’t remember how it feels.

I am reactionary, I am reflexes induced with rubber hammers,
I am what I was taught to be
And you have thrown off the shackles of prior knowledge,
Of lectures from people who know how you feel,
Of the battle between want and desire and need and feel and fear and require and dread,
Between should and must, between could and cannot.
You have escaped and now wait for me to shamble my way through,
And I am hanging back because this way to knowledge leads,
But I have left complacency behind and I rather miss it

And I am swearing up and down that God has told me that of this tree I shall not eat,
Nor even touch,
And you are asking me if he really said that,
You are encouraging me in heavenly ambitions, in a most liberating heresy;
You are showing me a world of little gods, all knowing right from wrong for themselves,
Naming them as values to be known or unknown,
Glaringly revealed or subtly obscured or ignored or reinvented or uniformly rejected or just never thought about,
Just never thought about.
And oh, your world is beautiful because you believe it
And mine is full of rubble and distant rumblings of dynamited foundations,
My world is self-destructing, it is unsustainable,
There is dust everywhere and broken furniture.

Your world is just one and mine is still two and I will never forgive you for knowing
When I am still asking.