I don’t have the right face for my feelings. I’m not beautiful. My features aren’t exquisite – soft, elegant, dainty – no, they are quite banal. I have a mean frown and people suspect coarseness inside indeed my core is hard and rough and uneven – like scars, dry and drying, like crackling scales. I don’t look frail or helpless enough to elicit compassion. I’ve had to box my way to the breathable front to the warm (smothering?) middle to the fringes, the quiet (l)edges like any plain human being: drained, fractured, bruised, bleeding through my smiles. I’ve had to claw my way to a hug. I have preached to an audience of one, ‘Get up, you’re soiling the floor with your tears, enough with the pathos’, I have soldiered on among the fields of slaughter to maim and be maimed. My gestures aren’t gentle, I’m white-knuckling it, basically, and that is bound to give you the occasional cramp I’ve grown a hump (it’s my emotional baggage, I like to keep it under my skin, it now sits on my shoulder like a pirate's macaw) I’ve developed a limp from all the rabbit holes I’ve stumbled or raced into My walk isn’t graceful and yet I tread with care. The road is strewn with hearts, lungs, kidneys, cheeks, livers of strangers but I have never crushed a heart that wasn’t my own (that is a learning process and people tell me I’m not very smart, they’re probably right, I’ve had teeth pulled without an anesthetic…) By the way, have you seen it? A regular heart, nothing special about it, red, bloody, pulsating with the occasional arrythmia I wonder where I’ve put it. There! It was right in my fist this whole time slowly dripping. It smells like iron and vinegar and it still tastes like salt.
Writer Between Worlds 