[michaelmck]

This may just strike a chord in all who read here, whatever member of the trinity you find yourself.

After being squeezed out into the world there was some sort of bloody squallering mess that was me. It was handed off to an orphanage where there were hands that didn't make it rubbing it and feeding it and wiping its nose and backside. So it goes.

I was thereafter given to a foster home, which I remember more vividly than I do see`the screen in front of me (and as bright) a presentation of sorts, an old man in the center, people very glad to see me. This image of people in a sparse kitchen, lit by the unearthly glow of a circular neon light above the sink, has haunted me to distraction enough to make me consider taking up art as a hobby, if only to express/exorcise it.

My mother would visit me periodically, and the stress reduction of nipple and sucking was clandestinely ours, hidden in a closet. My rebellious mother,

who eventually was told the lie she needed to hear in order to sign a piece of paper which granted legal status to two people who became my parents.

The very word, Parent, fills me with confliction not unlike the other important words...Love. Peace. God. Me.

So, back to the baby farm, and then to the other people who I would live with for eighteen years. They did their best. They were never parented properly nor had a chance to grow up themselves into the people they could have been. Regret is so shallow a perspective to find oneself in.

I believe that I was about four years old when I became a sexual object for my father. I was twelve when I started really messing up, until the day after my eighteenth birthday, when I tried flapping my grotesquely misshapen wings and fell out of the tree.

There was a five year period where I could not grieve like a normal man. (whatever that term may mean) I found every opportunity to stare at brick walls and untenanted commercial real estate and fields full of snow that no one used except the former owners of old tires, paint cans, and construction debris.

Now, many addictions and counsellors and broken relationships later, I am beginning to heal - thanks to God and the many people around me. No more chemical holidays or surrogate mothers or dependent friendships. Raw wounds hurt badly, but the pain lets me know I am alive, if nothing else.

Found the people in whose bodies I was before I was born. I have less of their looks than their memories, ideas. I never belonged where I was. I am learning to Love, so that I belong, wherever I am.

The lump in my throat right now is speaking to me, telling me that I am a liar, that my life of work and furious activity for a worthy goal is another convenient way of masking a face contorted with impotent anger and rage.

The eelpit that is my mind and insides has started seething, I poked a finger into it in order to write this and now something inside me is irritated and looking for a fight. I'll fight with it myself, and get thinner, and be grayer at 34.

Perhaps this is what it is supposed to be like. Perhaps the journey is worth the journey. Perhaps pain is necessary, and love is something vastly different.

My mind is on fire with visions of random planes of light the human body endlessly made wondering and reaching never grasping at amorphous thoughts and ghosts of emotions that reveal themselves to me,

in dreams,
in feelings,
in times of utter despondency and longing.

Longing to be-long. My heart's cry, throbbing, sanguine, if disenfranchised and faithless.