Equinox, Henry Darger, and the bad man

Equinox

a thin line of blood mingled with shaving cream on my leg



I wanted to carry you on a drum
but my fat lip stopped
                   everything

I took it as communion
ASCENSIONE
(it’s OK to eat the host)

&      some women you know they hate you 
&      you wonder why they don’t call
&      you wonder what you did wrong
&      you run down the hallway barefoot screaming
&      you burn a bit
a bit
                   golder

it does not get easier
it never gets easier
this is the HA HA Annie Oakley curse
pistol
rifle
shotgun
littlesureshot

*

Henry Darger is what I want to write about but this is also not what I want to write about
I want to write about Henry but I need to write about my abuser and this morning when I sat down at my computer and opened a blank Word document my heart was pounding and my hands were shaking (my hands never shake) I know I have to write about the bad man first because my guts now insist

I can’t start at the end when he chased me through the house then put a gun to my head that’s all I ever told any of my therapists or my psychiatrists when I had to explain my PTSD

*

Dear Henry,

I'm over and I hide in flames does it sound like your sacrificial sheep stood there I live in a hot kitchen hot pipes where four peregrine falcons circle believe me I learned the lesson of butter on a poultice I can’t fool you I have fallen where truth is sowed parked my hips invented a thief to live between my every thought I learned how to see startled like a white whippet an ink drawing of lettuce the whole wide world on stilts in Wales maybe I woke to see myself standing in the reeds maybe I was an object of the queen and drunk at night

*

I met him and started having sex with him when I was 18 and newly married to someone else he lived in the duplex next door it got messy right away it’s fuzzy now and weird I called my father and he gave me the money to take a greyhound bus to California where I settled into a religious commune high in the mountains of Humboldt County but that’s all I can write today I feel ill my danger guts spilling out all over the place

he will never not haunt me
maybe I can write him out of me

trepidation

*

Dear Henry,

you said you knew what it's like inside but you lied under a bank of lights men and women moved rapidly covered  me with warm sheets I chose to stay awake in spite of being betrayed perhaps a saintly height there was a knock we were under arrest Frances the kids the bookie hand-on-chest heroics I wore dark rimmed glasses showered every morning and every night you never satisfied my obsession with truth or learned to cook a lye-laced Bon Ami shot at best and drunk without books enthusiastic about my portraits and my magneto giant vulpine loping and scratching in the muddy crawl space under your precious floorboards

*

I am not brave enough to write about the frightening part under the part I have been tiptoeing around for so many years I am reading Tia Levings’ brilliant and heartbreaking memoir A Well-Trained Wife and it’s opened a hot needle of fear and bravery inside me I want to write about him but when I try I really want to lock all my doors and pull my blanket over my head all these years later and it makes me angry that he still affects me this way and I know I have to write it in order to gain my power back Levings’ book has unlocked a powerful key inside me

*
Dear Henry,

I am being chastised I spent a lifetime being chastised I woke up you pull my hair question how I tend my animals remind me of your fierce life your sweet addictions your chambers your lighthouse I thought I had it figured out but I don’t even have my own lungs figured out much less the architecture of the universe the meaning of the cigar smoke I smell at the oddest times or why that damned black bear swam across the sound wandered around on the beach then visited a suburban neighborhood before he ran across the freeway only to get hit by an unsuspecting driver and how that driver must have felt seeing the bear out of nowhere I swell up in my head and my eyes push out like turnips I wrote my phone number on the inside of a red matchbook but the phone doesn’t ring you are feral I am feral I keep my legs crossed at the ankle and my arms inside the ride at all times but it’s tricky it’s tricky and it seeps out into my pungent reality I can’t see around that big curve of earth and up the mud-soaked red clay road I can’t remember what I promised or why the irises refuse to bloom though they are packed tight in their green dresses packed so tight and hard they burn purple lips crisping at their edges

*

I want to name him can I name him? should I name him?
IHOPEHESDEAD

(I want to throw up now I want to take all the above and fold it and fold it and fold it until it becomes a tiny pit then I want to bury it somewhere far from my beautiful life)

*

Dear Henry,

I am mindless no belief in angels barely sentient immobile and singular it’s Sunday I can hear the veins of the rational world everyone in a dream is also dreaming the milk hour the gaunt hour the children’s hour I need to dream around the planetary tides here on the border everything is exposed malignant blind without direction you walk in the river measuring my attention the contrails of dreams the complicated earth instead of the one I love

Tomorrow is the Equinox I want to light it on fire I hope you can join me