Savior Complex (audio)

I am not your savior in any sense of that word. I cannot save you from boredom or fury, jealousy, rage, desperation. Can’t take those sharp-toothed desires and soothe them for you so you can sleep it off and buy yourself some time. But something about the way you look at me makes me think you think I could if I would just put my body close enough to yours. And lord forgive me, I like the way you shift your eyes from the corner to the floor to the inside of my thighs. It’d be cute if I were writing you into the plot of some kind of fantasy. Maybe I’d give you everything you think you want right before I rob you blind.

People are full to the neck of complicated story lines, the amount of conflict out in the world is nothing compared to the wars going on inside our own brains. We are quiet about it though. So quiet you begin to believe you are the only one with the problem. But none of their stories are my business. I keep my head down and stay in my lane. I don’t know what you have done in your past and you don’t know what I’ve been through in mine. Either you want to listen with genuine curious detachment or you want to sell me something money can’t buy. But maybe it could.

Maybe if the price weren’t too low or too high. If it cost me just enough that I feel the risk in my stomach. Have to turn it over and over in my mind before I finally give in. There was a man once who wrote something so obscene to me that I had to trash it so nobody else would see. Strangers. Comics. Clowns. Perverts. Obstacles. Everybody is a carnival all their own inside. Distorted mirrors and the smell of funnel cakes and lemonade and ice cream melting into the hot, hot, blacktop. A large painted metal trash can overflowing with sticky mangled trash. Empty bottles rolling around and around the fairgrounds for miles and miles in the oppressive summer sun.