They read my words and think they are mine but there is no way that can be true. I don’t think like this. I don’t sound or fit together like this. This is not me, this is me trying to get to me. Can you not see that? That every time I approach the writing the writing throws me up against the concrete. These words do not want to give themselves to me.
This is why I am gentle. This is why I approach with folded hands, skinned knees, hollow bones. What I seek is unhinged around a dark corner which moves away when I get close. I search for cracks in the ceiling skin, faces in the mirror. I count out loud for the way thunder forces open the fists of the rain. I taste the tremble in your fingers as they spill wet heat upon my legs. There is no mystery in doing the work and yet the scratching underneath the surface is everywhere. I once heard a wise man say that a writer just observes what other people don’t take the time to notice. Maybe that is even closer to the truth than we would dare admit.
The way we salivate over satin flesh and annihilation. The way we don’t notice anything anymore. We don’t feel the earth sliding off the edge of the precipice, the fire in the sickness coughing up the back of your throat. The way you turn away from me without moving a muscle as the red evening stiffens in the center of my cemetery chest. We pack our eyes with mud instead of drinking one another.
And so my eyes do their best to become the words you need. I let the secrets in my body scream. Here are the break-away walls of my life, it seems. My small heart beats. My instrument.
.
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Allison Marie Conway 