hello, old friend
Fairy Tale
we all know
how Superman had this thing
for Lois Lane
(she had sexy legs after all)
but i know
how once upon a time
Superman fell in love
with Little Red Riding Hood
(they had similar tastes in clothing).
he saved her
from the Big Bad Wolf
and saw that hiding behind
her picnic basket
she was pretty
(in an innocent sorta way).
so he took her out dancin'
and she baked him a pie.
Grandma liked him
but thought him maybe queer
(it was the red spandex briefs)
and they parted ways--
Red had priorities at home
while Superman
had a world to save.
but they never forgot
nights in red capes.
i grew lonely for my poetry, and began looking through the literary journals of yore from high school and college. rather than poems these days, prose is what springs into my head. this afternoon, i was writing a passage about my daughter, and how i almost spoke of her to a stranger. now i'm in the mood to write about chameleons.
i guess the two could be related. i guess my daughter is the chameleon i see in my backgrounds of everyday. we were talking about children, this stranger and i, which isn't so strange because i often talk to strangers and often about children. i almost boasted on my daughter's ability to walk at an early age. the words were at the tip of my tongue; my eyes must have betrayed me, because the stranger clung to my breath in the air.
oh. yes.
and then it shattered. she never learned how to walk. that was just a dream i had the other night, where she was 9 and alive and...and...
i cannot be sure of her. this time of year would have been her birthday. and that is all i know. i honestly cannot say for sure that it was a girl; it was only a blind guess. still, girls are the best changelings, which made it appropriate to label her thus. she would have been mine, good or bad.
and that's why women are such odd creatures. we shed little pieces of ourselves, give them names and identities seperate from our own, teach them to be something hopefully human, when really we are trying to pass off chunks of our own flesh that we've hidden into society. it's all so secretive--most of us even change our names before doing this. as if morphing the identity of our present selves can change who we were. flipping through the college literary magazines, i recognized a few names as belonging to girls that have since married and now changed their initials. "i'm not Smith, i'm Jones now," they will say. "yes," i will argue, "but i knew you when you were Smith." i knew the you that stayed up till 4am, willing to heat up a pot of ramen with me because you had nothing better to do. i knew the you that ate my burned french toast, and listened to Wheezer to humor me, and danced because your heart told you to. you would tolerate none of this now, because you are Jones. am i to become the same way?
my children will have seen my scars from the inside, because it is from those indentations that they will be forged. they will be the only people on earth utterly and completely impossible for me to hide from. they will know i burn french toast before having ever seen me do it. they will know that i have always been this way, and nothing about me has changed. i'm just not as afraid anymore.
and none of that made a lick of sense, nor was it cohesive. but i'm going to leave it as it is. it was hard enough on its own.