chapter ix
it has been four days since i lost my thighs. and everyone has been noticing; everywhere i go. strung against a zebra flannel, a bronze talisman, and a camouflage handkerchief, i am half-bodied, inelegant and exposed. at my age of two years and three months, it is not in the Lancaster social conventions to support anyone as hedonic and Bohemian as me. as a result of which, i have developed tremendous insecurities.
i will not lie and hide the fact that i am insecure about my race, the color and texture of my skin, early-onset pockmarks and my unequaled roundness. i am of an orange-brown, a burnt face, with severe psoriasis and xerotic eczema. to cope under these bitter circumstances, sheila gave me an alter-ego, a beautified intelligence, a twinge of the rational and the virtue of perception. a voice with which i can croon to the sparrows, straddling the lips of burnt azaleas. a voice with which i can speak to my self, unaided and spiffy, and create a shell of make-believe preponderance, to machinate and orchestrate an esoteric living, to beg the humane for civil justice, to prove the inertia of my deceitful alienation --all in a pleat of my menstrual adulthood, in a search for establishment. the scope of my wandering is beyond any containment; beyond any boundary of society, litigation and morality. in this search for establishment, i am in my own power to experiment with sexuality, to appreciate nature and deconstruct my social class. but i am an outcast, a polygamist and a social scientist. a morphometric schizophrenic, with a serious condition that Dr Rigo doesn't know about. my adult baby syndrome.
as a button, i am born with very specific and defined roles. primarily, perhaps, to hold together the shame and dignity of your absolute forbearing. peeking my arms through a lip of cotton, gliding past a corrugation of your fabric, rough on the edges and smooth on the surface, and blossoming, finally, into a full embrace of the pearly atmosphere, a bouquet of clouds and warm, autumn buttermilk. secondarily, i am a barrier to the phenomenon of nudity. or in the use of careful concealment. allium and liatris, for example, use my tongue for lesbian debauchery in a peculiar garage on Cornelia Street -sweating through their nipples, dictating ideologies of radical feminism, and creating of me a spectacular Libertarian. they wear garlands of syphilis, beads of cherries and olive make-up. read Rousseau and Wallace while listening to the Velvet Underground and confess to the occasional identity of confused Beatniks. their seminal philosophies revolve around the performance of concealment -to button up, in a wiry, speculative sense of glamorous magnificence. polished and refined from a wild exterior; but what a harrowing, tumultuous mesh of discordance occupying inside -it makes me tear up. this is the story of today's reality. or maybe my devolving reality. counterpoised and targeted to paint away, to brush away, to melt away the black and white with a whistle and a smile. it is the fad of spectra -everything is purposeful, edgy and charismatic.
he broke me when i was, only, an amateur wallflower. in a matter of microseconds, behind an accident, on the fortieth page of the Torah. gregory arthur gould. a twenty four year old half-Italian half-Greek climatologist from Wellesley, MA. undetectable, HIV positive. this happened at a clinic on 54th Street. with the delivery of the news there was first a disbelief, followed by an outrage followed by a soul tearing, glass smashing disarray of negativity, anger, dismissal and denial. shortly after, he took me by his hand and broke me into seven pieces. burnt a few of my fingers, trashed a few more, and spared me. i know the pain of severe disability, though i cannot communicate, i cannot speak or write or dance to gould, to explain the fable of brooke atkinson, McNally Jackson or the life un-lived. but my broken state, my fierce bipolarity, my tri-partite insecurities are elements of my existence i am coping with today. perhaps, tomorrow will be worse.
he broke me when i was, only, an amateur wallflower. in a matter of microseconds, behind an accident, on the fortieth page of the Torah. gregory arthur gould. a twenty four year old half-Italian half-Greek climatologist from Wellesley, MA. undetectable, HIV positive. this happened at a clinic on 54th Street. with the delivery of the news there was first a disbelief, followed by an outrage followed by a soul tearing, glass smashing disarray of negativity, anger, dismissal and denial. shortly after, he took me by his hand and broke me into seven pieces. burnt a few of my fingers, trashed a few more, and spared me. i know the pain of severe disability, though i cannot communicate, i cannot speak or write or dance to gould, to explain the fable of brooke atkinson, McNally Jackson or the life un-lived. but my broken state, my fierce bipolarity, my tri-partite insecurities are elements of my existence i am coping with today. perhaps, tomorrow will be worse.
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