gender doctor asks me how it's going, say pretty good of course, we both shrug and laugh at the absurdity of assessing status in a world gone mad, it's gratis, greener in another life. well it's pretty good except that every day's a little tireder, I don't like to be awake, I hate my job and hate my days and hate my isolation, calling thrift to take the big old couch i got in '21, hoping for big group hangs and movies, but we still can't breathe each other safely. pretty good except that every day i'm watching myself be dismantled out loud and learning you can lie loud enough that hurt don't matter, they're gonna cackle while their knuckle skin splits however hard we try to be. pretty good except that nothing i do feels like it matters in the least, that if i get a week off work i start to feel alive again like half my brain's submerged formaldehyde and resurrected pulled gasping from the grave. frankenstein myself every day to stagger forward in service of everything i disbelieve. keep the job making oppressive computers wring out microdermabrasions beautifying business
reminding myself that if i can't make cathedrals, i can still paint caves. make my goals smaller and smaller. every dream achieved at my own expense, debt compressing, everybody knows it. forever aged complaints, deliberately loose and artless. nobody receiving, but if i can't scribble bullshit to myself then where do i think the? foreclosing the cave. people hating self so vicious it's catching. lean in to listen, catch a breath-based calamity or moral infirmity
doctor asks how, pretty, except that i used to run five miles and now i don't even want to walk around the block. used to make a room laugh and sing and now it's quietly trying not to bother the neighbors. outburst swallowed til no tums enough for the art burn. stupid wordplay looking at my old emails like how did anybody ever put in the effort to understand me. desperate for novelty at the expense of clarity. evidently brain strange and struggling to crack jokes if that's the only way to be heard.
when i actually say to a doctor how i'm feeling, their eyes widen and they come up short. nothing can fix the frame when its rusted out. so i'll let myself write messy feelings because i earn them
been this way the whole time. perplexingly misbroken and a step away from failure. on either side of the line. everyone eager to cast me down for one misstep, one word out of place, i've been smarter than the class and never paid a decent rate. how's your family? how's your savings? how's your future? how's your bonus? things you take for granted that i won't and never owned. i've been paycheck to paycheck since 2005. and it's stupid just to type it out because all anybody can do about it is say "sorry, wow, that sucks, hope you feel better, don't give up"
motherfucker i give up once or twice a day and decide to keep on anyway. if they tear me down for political discomfort, it wasn't jenga, it was rubble, and was barely worth the struggle