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Civilizing Mission
- University Press of Colorado
- Chapter
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25 The Endangered You Because the you slipped from me like a bead of mercury. Sometimes it was a big you with long gray hair and other times it was a young man with a curl on his forehead, a vicious girl in a bathtub. The you had burrs that made my hands alive with small tears, but I kept it around, hoping someday I would learn how to use it except I was lazy and never did. My you, my you. Your insistent voice becomes the scrolling windows. I lent it to a friend and she used it a lot more than I did—for letters and speeches. After a while I would come to her house and the you was a little more frayed than the last time. We pretended for a while that she would be giving it back but we both knew that it wasn’t mine anymore. Sometimes I actually got jealous and wished I had a you until I remembered how I had had one and neglected it. One day after a few glasses of wine, I told her I had no need for it and that she could keep it. After a few more glasses I told her that I did miss it a great deal and I took it back from her. After that night she stopped calling me and answering my emails. I sentimentalized the you because to say you is warming. The you is irrelevant but still always within reach because I seldom do things without an audience. When I actually have it in my hands after leaving it under a pile of bills or laundry, the you looks to me with indifference. The you insists that I engage lightly and instead I stomp around and wake the whole neighborhood with my boots to let everyone know what I think of the you’s ideas. It’s not safe to bandy it around like we’re all in on it. We’re the opposite of in on it. We’re inside and waving our little white flag. 26 Stockholm Syndrome The city’s banishment is the hand where I sleep like a foundling. Yellow streetlights bristle against the grid, and I quiver like an obedient child. I covet the stink of weed and funk in the hours before dawn—the worst time since it’s cool and barbaric. Then it’s that morning of brackish soup of which I would eat gallons. Once the city was a he, his arms around our congress with enough alchemy to narcotize, eyes rolled back. Once it was a she and we experimented with each other’s tongues because of anonymous and polymorphous. The radiant heaping dogshit and its glaze on our skins, tastes of irony, of nickel. A newspaper drifts down Mission Ave.and announces our new war,the folds alter the story.The broken glass, a prism for the burdock in the cracks. Wrappers scuttle like living things, skins shed of flesh. The half-sounds from my mouth are dirty with pathos, with yellow neon. The alley, my polluted gullet. Launched into this world poor and blind, I got hooked on turmoil and it’s been costly. Once on the edge of the ocean, I stepped on a bit of wood with a nail in it, love-bite. The ocean stunned herself against the shore because of our loneliness. Church bell sounded dusk to reify our seclusions. ...