The tarnished key

A deep pain crept into my shoulder for over a week. I refused healing from others: I doubt it comes from a place that I'm ready for others to touch. Slowly, I stretch and squirm, working through the pinching, spastic twinge on my own.

It began Sunday morning. That night, I found a bag full of ramen and turkey sausage on my front steps, food that I cannot eat. I placed it in the trash, as it was late and I hadn't the desire to walk it to the church up the street. That morning, I awoke to the sound of two men loudly grousing about finding the food in the trash. One was the broken vagrant who made the decision that he owns the front steps of the apartment I'm renting, by the very value that his ass warmed the concrete and one of the neighbors enables his deteriorated state by feeding him and paying for his detritus-filled car, instead of paying for possible rehabilitation for the fellow. The broken one described me to his enabler with venom. During this, I was keeping my ex company. She's of a fragile, defensive state, and she remains quite susceptible to the rage and venom within my heart. Reflexively, I swallowed down the rage that welled up in me over this situation, and the base of my neck thus suffers.

Many times, a person considers repression to affect just sexuality. While yes, I have stuffed this aspect of the libido down, I do believe that I have tossed away a greater portion of it. I have little room to unfold myself from my home. I have no control over my surroundings. I have denied self-development. I key in to the needs of others on reflex, allowing them to supercede my own desires. I take on too much from others, and I take nothing for myself. My dream is to have a space in which I might live as I choose: silent, my books at my fingertips, with furniture that supports my body. I wish to express myself across my environment without restriction, which thus far I cannot. I once again have packed myself into a box and placed it out of reach.

In place of ambition, I have subversion and spite. I have no dream for myself, and I spit acid at any who would stand in my territory and attempt to dictate it, even when I have permitted them so far within those borders. I ask for my martyrdom and then mourn my victimhood. The martyr gives not blood, but intoxicating wine. It directs through envy, lechery and blind retribution.

I see so much of myself that I have cast to the wind, to carry far away from me. My heart lies bound in vines and tar. It beats for a moment, only to feed the overgrowth and warm the sticky, ungrowing remains of living material. I wield a simple knife of cold steel, to sever and to scrape that which suffocates the pulse. I must empty my vessel of detritus. I must collect the refuse and the compost. I must sort these to find what might create the prime matter, and I must make it burn to create the elixir, the medium through which the Divine operates. I can see this path. I must take this path, or I will surely die.