TheBanyanTree: This is How it Feels

[maria gibson]

Ok.  Big knife, big fucking knife in the middle of my chest.  Can't get rid
of it, don't know how.  Some people know it's there but most others don't
and I'm too somethingsomething to tell them.  Lots of words come to mind,
none to fingers.  You'd think that a person would do all she could to remove
that thing hanging out of her.  I mean, I try to get away but I look down
and it's still there being all sorts of mean and mean to me.  Every damn
time I turn around, I am still there.  How'm I supposed to get away from
myself?  Because obviously the knife is going no where and where I go it
goes and then I show up and it's all three of us.

Sometimes it fades from the forefront a bit and I relax a little and I
think, ok, ok, I'm going to be ok and soon it'll come out slowly and I'll
learn to understand all of the reasons I allowed the damn thing to stay
where it is and why I allowed it to be plunged into my heart in the first
place and why, oh why and then bam.  Not a big bam, no, a little bam.
Starts hurting reallyreally bad like a motherfucker in fact and I feel back
at square one.  I try to sleep with it and toss and turn, have to take a
little helpy on the side to make it through because if I wake up, oh God, if
I wake up, I swear the tape that plays all day long in my head and which has
been looping and looping as I slumbered will turn the lights up really
quickly and a woken girl will be thrust right into the middle of this loop
which has no end and no beginning and seems to run constantly; awake,
asleep, working, showering, talking with friends, you name it.  I'll even
look attentive but I promise, that damn tape is playing with a vigorous
determination to make me watch and watch and watch.  And then, just for
fun.  Watch again.  I'm weary.  I can truly understand why a person would
want to erase the meory of another person from their mind such as in that
movie with Jim Carey.  Whew.  I can't even imagine the relief of cutting the
tape in half so that it could never loop around in my head again.

And the bad part, the really bad part, is that...it wasn't a good knife in
the first place.  Dull, cutting me in jagged tears and sneakily jutting from
the corner of the counter without provocation so that I would nick myself on
the tip of the damn thing without warning.  Rusty, handle pitted from too
mcuh use and abuse, worn and full of splinters.  It just didn't serve me
well and yet.  I miss something about the way it was before it was buried
handle deep and oozing my life's blood all over the freaking place.  Can't
put my finger on why I am so sad about the turn of events and that is why I
can get away from the you know what sticking out of you know where.
Everytime I turn around there's a pile of pain just waiting for me to trip
over so that I will fall on the knife and it can go just. A. Little. Deeper.

I just don't know what to do with the this sharp thing I live with everyday.

Maria