flynnfromblakely

  Someone Else’s Muse (Portrait of Eloise)   I think, I have always been lonely.   Not alone, of course, that would be ridiculous. There are plenty others here with me, in this sea of faces,  oil and wax and bronze, both lively and deadlike by turn. None of them match me. I am lucky that way –  the Untitleds across the room continually bicker for having the same subject, insisting each one is the true  Henry or Robert or whatever the man’s name is. I think it is Henry. For a man who spends so much time  in this room he speaks very little.   Henry is new to me. I once lived in a very different house with my subject and a man, much shorter than  Henry, with a tangle of ginger hair. I don’t like mess in the slightest, but for some reason he reminded me  of the lighthouse on the leftmost wall, a tumbling, turbulent space with distant thunder. After I was born,  and lived there, he always matched that ferocity in his walk, his ...

  -to the teenage girls who get talked over in conversations. you deserve to be heard. chaos is the natural state. the sea-glass vase aches to tumble  from endtable to floor  and shatter i only supply the encouragement it needs. the door wants to gunshot slam open and bury handle first  into the wall like a turned around knife and i only supply the force to move. and the night is so quiet it starves for the noise of a bookshelf felled as its leafy fathers and the person -  my person -  hurrying out in our always routine. “ what is it this time? what did you do?” the cat is innocent of course -  it is only me and my inside outside breaking. you try to dispel  through pretty words  calm songs and i alight the tablecloth with your incense and pretty candles make the whole room dance light  until a glass of water drowns my glee. i sing my own songs in words i cannot speak smash the porcelain plates and lightbulbs stomping foot-painting crims...

 it is cold in me the orange glow off rainsoaked road and blank sky reaching over it is cold in me a faded faced photo of a smiling face and slick hair of who i chase the face of a love that must have died, i think for it is cold in me  and i am cold in it  as rain traces blurring makeup in my eyes i may short if i stay out longer. i may want to. short these wired hands and cold eyes of metal kissing my torn flesh and empty soul around each corner the whirling lights in my mind pause to catch and  process weave jumbled fractal camera feed into shifting picture of vacant desperate storefronts and dark-windowed broken homes blood and oil in my torn self ripped pieces thrumming as in one purpose one need i must find them and there is a light in the window  and its glow is of them. of me. for i know i must win or lose the last human part of  this patchwork soul.

  You need to live alone, or close to it. With yourself, or your cat, or with your divorced father in a small town that most of your family moved away from when he was young. Be a simple, easy to care for baby, quiet, but not a whirlwind of terror like your mother thought you were. Be a quiet child. Wear lacy, pink sweaters, and shiny Mary-Jane shoes with butterfly stickers on them. Have a sweet tooth, and chug sweet, sticky apple juice like a frat boy making out with a keg. Brush your hair one hundred strokes each and every morning until it’s soft and shiny and lays flat under a pink ribbon. Cry when the boys make fun of you, and laugh when the teacher tells a joke. Somehow, you know what “defenestrate” means, and you have to have that talk with your father at age five when you read a National Geographic and have some uncomfortable questions. Stay quiet when people ask why your mother left, and know your father’s new girlfriend doesn’t hit him. Go to church every Sunday, and...

       We were both so young then, when he first said it. “It’s okay, I’m right here.” We were both young, and he was a year older. Back then, that was a world of difference. “It’s okay, I’m right here.” He smoothed a bandage over my cut knee – his mother always made him carry them, I remember, out of concern for his own safety. Yet here he was, worrying over me, the annoying little kid next door.   “It’s okay, I’m right here.” A few years later, on that old playground with flaking paint and that merry go round that always tilted a little bit on one side. Someone had pushed me down, taken my favorite plush lamb I kept with me. He gave it back, a small dot of blood on its left ear. The aggressor had fallen down, he said, and hit his nose on the ground. A stray tree root, or something like that. And he told me he had accidentally given himself that black eye that formed a few days later. “It’s okay,” he said, once again, wearing the purpled s...