Delta40
05-14-2010, 09:20 AM
Highly Protected Secret
This is my account and I don’t want to act about it. Or on it. Pretence matters, like the cheap ****ty makeup I wear to hide who I am. I’ve been using that crap all my life. I wonder if this means I don’t believe I deserve any better. You know, like the Loreal ads say – ‘Because you’re worth it.’ Worth what? Hiding under even thicker layers? I tell myself it’s a false economy but really, it’s my face staring back at me in the mirror that I can’t bear. No matter what I do, I can’t erase what is hidden underneath.
For no reason, I will burst out, ‘I love you,’ or ‘I’m never going to do that again!’ It happens while I’m reading, working or watching telly, when some distressing memory enters my mind and I need to deflect it verbally before it really gets in the way. Once I’ve uttered something out loud, I can turn my attention to why on earth I just said what I did and avoid whatever it was that I was going to get damn uncomfortable about.
What coagulated fatty tripe I wade through. Surely everybody has uncomfortable history? Those who say ‘I don’t,’ are mostly lying or in denial. I silently weep when I watch ‘Touched by an Angel.’ I smear what I don’t wish to face and filter it into some American melodrama so I can’t see, hear, or smell the unspeakable.
I would like to watch an episode where the Gaelic Angel called Monica glows for me. She doesn’t though.
I like to study the faces of older people when I’m on the bus. I imagine myself when I am their age. Do the hairstyles of old women mean anything? What gaze do I have now that will determine the way my hair goes when I am seventy? Do people notice how old women are spread across the Australian landscape?
At forty, my skin is dry and wooden – like my expression. It is a unique form of leprosy from the hallway at my mother’s house. It was a cramped space with vomit coloured shag pile carpet. When all the doors were closed, it was completely dark. My skin problems started at my knees.
Lately, I’ve taken to using Nutri-metics cream. I love the smell of apricots. It reminds me……of absolutely nothing. There were no apricots in my childhood. Maybe they will smooth out the cracked flaky bits and heal the stabs of pain that cause me to say those odd, unrelated things when I rub too long. At its worst, my skin feels as rough as tree bark.
My brother hasn’t visited the house in a long time. He has disgusting skin too. Leprosy is not the correct name of course. It is something much harder to treat. We both have it. It covers different areas of our bodies. My legs are dry, flaky and blotchy. The knees are calloused as if I had spent a lifetime in servitude.
I think, looking at old women on the buses that my hair will go metal grey. It will be long, unkempt and pulled back severely into a bun. My scalp flakes at the temples. Fortunately, I will not pencil my eyebrows. I may even have thicker ones than I already do. Perhaps I will look almost masculine in this regard.
My skin will be scaly though. The disease will progress. By my twilight years, it will have gnawed its way from within, to seep through to the surface so that there is no way I can hide my shame from the world. Its toxic waste has infected my soul already. If you hang it out it billows in the wind, moth eaten.
I can still taste the intimate saltiness of my brother.
His hot excitement threatening to spill over.
In my mouth.
Over my hands.
My chest.
I remember his smell.
My touch.
In the darkened hallway, on my knees, I used what senses I had to find my way.
On telly, I’ve watched the Angel Monica tell a multitude of people that God loves them despite their sins. But never an incestuous one. It seems no guiding light is cast upon them. Not now. Not in dark hallways.
How do I give poetry to incestral ugly? What sap flows through my roots, which ground me as each limb contorts and gnarls to look like death in life?
This is a copse I don’t wish to visit, yet it is part of the landscape in which I dwell. Nothing blossoms here. Instead, infinite decomposition without explanation.
I avoid my brother. Only he knows what his elbows and knees look like. The older and woodier I become, how desperate I am to rid this tangled part of me. Yet in life, my roots are revealed along the way. My journey of ancestry only links me to my experience of incestry. I have one life map and any path I take, leads me back to that which I seek to flee. What memories I try to amputate, fall to the ground, rot, go back into the earth, only to feed my familial roots once again.
No foundation, cheap or otherwise will mask ancestry, patterns, past or present.
Nutri-metics cream is not as good as it claims to be. I try to apply it absentmindedly, while watching telly, reading or sitting at my desk. Of course, I never can as I have to consciously decide to squeeze some out onto my rough bark skin. I inhale the apricots and by sheer association of ideas, I remember why I have the cream in the first place. It reminds me…….of absolutely everything.
I have several 100 year snapshots of maternal lineage, whose austere gaze transfix me. Like great oaks they stand in self-imposed majesty. What secrets are held within their breast at the moment the shutter clicked? Across generations, the same eyes peer out from oddly similar faces. They are privy to my stain on their blessed genealogical landscape. I ponder when my legacy was born. Who dared pass this cup to me? I am met with a thick, dusty curtain of incestral silence. It looms around me like a soot cloud.
How do I rip the wings from butterflies and feel it is good? Yet it is what I will do when I tell the people I love.
Meantime, I wonder about symbolism, hairstyles, how the lines on our face are the written histories of our life. As the bus made its way to Fremantle yesterday, I read the story of an elderly woman who boarded in Beaconsfield.
Strong woman.
Subjected to trials and tribulations
Beautiful snowy mass with just a hint of blue.
She figured she was worth it.
I expect she was.
Roots firmly fixed in the landscape.
A L’oreal woman for sure.
As we came over the hilly rise of Lefroy Street, the sun’s golden rays were dazzling and settled easily upon her. There was no doubt in my mind that she at least was loved by the Angel Monica.
This is my account and I don’t want to act about it. Or on it. Pretence matters, like the cheap ****ty makeup I wear to hide who I am. I’ve been using that crap all my life. I wonder if this means I don’t believe I deserve any better. You know, like the Loreal ads say – ‘Because you’re worth it.’ Worth what? Hiding under even thicker layers? I tell myself it’s a false economy but really, it’s my face staring back at me in the mirror that I can’t bear. No matter what I do, I can’t erase what is hidden underneath.
For no reason, I will burst out, ‘I love you,’ or ‘I’m never going to do that again!’ It happens while I’m reading, working or watching telly, when some distressing memory enters my mind and I need to deflect it verbally before it really gets in the way. Once I’ve uttered something out loud, I can turn my attention to why on earth I just said what I did and avoid whatever it was that I was going to get damn uncomfortable about.
What coagulated fatty tripe I wade through. Surely everybody has uncomfortable history? Those who say ‘I don’t,’ are mostly lying or in denial. I silently weep when I watch ‘Touched by an Angel.’ I smear what I don’t wish to face and filter it into some American melodrama so I can’t see, hear, or smell the unspeakable.
I would like to watch an episode where the Gaelic Angel called Monica glows for me. She doesn’t though.
I like to study the faces of older people when I’m on the bus. I imagine myself when I am their age. Do the hairstyles of old women mean anything? What gaze do I have now that will determine the way my hair goes when I am seventy? Do people notice how old women are spread across the Australian landscape?
At forty, my skin is dry and wooden – like my expression. It is a unique form of leprosy from the hallway at my mother’s house. It was a cramped space with vomit coloured shag pile carpet. When all the doors were closed, it was completely dark. My skin problems started at my knees.
Lately, I’ve taken to using Nutri-metics cream. I love the smell of apricots. It reminds me……of absolutely nothing. There were no apricots in my childhood. Maybe they will smooth out the cracked flaky bits and heal the stabs of pain that cause me to say those odd, unrelated things when I rub too long. At its worst, my skin feels as rough as tree bark.
My brother hasn’t visited the house in a long time. He has disgusting skin too. Leprosy is not the correct name of course. It is something much harder to treat. We both have it. It covers different areas of our bodies. My legs are dry, flaky and blotchy. The knees are calloused as if I had spent a lifetime in servitude.
I think, looking at old women on the buses that my hair will go metal grey. It will be long, unkempt and pulled back severely into a bun. My scalp flakes at the temples. Fortunately, I will not pencil my eyebrows. I may even have thicker ones than I already do. Perhaps I will look almost masculine in this regard.
My skin will be scaly though. The disease will progress. By my twilight years, it will have gnawed its way from within, to seep through to the surface so that there is no way I can hide my shame from the world. Its toxic waste has infected my soul already. If you hang it out it billows in the wind, moth eaten.
I can still taste the intimate saltiness of my brother.
His hot excitement threatening to spill over.
In my mouth.
Over my hands.
My chest.
I remember his smell.
My touch.
In the darkened hallway, on my knees, I used what senses I had to find my way.
On telly, I’ve watched the Angel Monica tell a multitude of people that God loves them despite their sins. But never an incestuous one. It seems no guiding light is cast upon them. Not now. Not in dark hallways.
How do I give poetry to incestral ugly? What sap flows through my roots, which ground me as each limb contorts and gnarls to look like death in life?
This is a copse I don’t wish to visit, yet it is part of the landscape in which I dwell. Nothing blossoms here. Instead, infinite decomposition without explanation.
I avoid my brother. Only he knows what his elbows and knees look like. The older and woodier I become, how desperate I am to rid this tangled part of me. Yet in life, my roots are revealed along the way. My journey of ancestry only links me to my experience of incestry. I have one life map and any path I take, leads me back to that which I seek to flee. What memories I try to amputate, fall to the ground, rot, go back into the earth, only to feed my familial roots once again.
No foundation, cheap or otherwise will mask ancestry, patterns, past or present.
Nutri-metics cream is not as good as it claims to be. I try to apply it absentmindedly, while watching telly, reading or sitting at my desk. Of course, I never can as I have to consciously decide to squeeze some out onto my rough bark skin. I inhale the apricots and by sheer association of ideas, I remember why I have the cream in the first place. It reminds me…….of absolutely everything.
I have several 100 year snapshots of maternal lineage, whose austere gaze transfix me. Like great oaks they stand in self-imposed majesty. What secrets are held within their breast at the moment the shutter clicked? Across generations, the same eyes peer out from oddly similar faces. They are privy to my stain on their blessed genealogical landscape. I ponder when my legacy was born. Who dared pass this cup to me? I am met with a thick, dusty curtain of incestral silence. It looms around me like a soot cloud.
How do I rip the wings from butterflies and feel it is good? Yet it is what I will do when I tell the people I love.
Meantime, I wonder about symbolism, hairstyles, how the lines on our face are the written histories of our life. As the bus made its way to Fremantle yesterday, I read the story of an elderly woman who boarded in Beaconsfield.
Strong woman.
Subjected to trials and tribulations
Beautiful snowy mass with just a hint of blue.
She figured she was worth it.
I expect she was.
Roots firmly fixed in the landscape.
A L’oreal woman for sure.
As we came over the hilly rise of Lefroy Street, the sun’s golden rays were dazzling and settled easily upon her. There was no doubt in my mind that she at least was loved by the Angel Monica.