Spoken Word Prose

JEZABEL

My cat just died in my lap.

She was lots of fun when she was young, but then she started to get fat, and then got fatter than that… she got bumpy and her spine curled up and then her bumps got lumpy, and she started to appear weighted down and went less and less on our beds and kept more to the ground when she got too chunky.

She limped and she wobbled and her head bobbled and in her later days her breathing got faster and I didn’t think she’d last much longer, but, nevertheless, she didn’t weaken – it appeared she got stronger.

But clearly I was seeing it wrong. Her breaths became shorter and she stopped eating and kept her eyes open, and all the while she was staring and looking and shaking and no longer interested in the noise we were making as we called her name.

I picked her up many times and she roused from her waking dream but she didn’t seem to want to ‘be’. I desperately wished I could help her, release her, slow her breathing and give her peace and ease her.

And then she got colder, and when I held her it was like I was holding a boulder.

It hurt her to breathe. I could see her pain through her fear and I gently told her over and over that she can pass… I was here… and before long, her breathing slowed and then she spasm’d, and as I held her I knew she was close to the chasm, shaking and numb in my hands.

She tried once more to stand but she spasm’d again and her jaw grew wider and I could almost see right down inside her as she laboured to breathe while her heart gave out.

I cried when I looked through her eyes as she looked back knowing it was her time to die, allowing me to watch her once bright spark in that final moment subside.

I counted to 5 and I told her it’s okay to not be alive.

I’m sure she knew what I’d said as she rested her tired body on my skirt and lay there bravely, blissfully dead; a part of me journeying with her as I stroked her lifeless – but beautiful – feline head.

OVER AND OUT

Here it comes, another one of your excuses… without a doubt you’ll shower me with a thunderstorm of abuses. I bite my tongue and bleed it out in silence, trying to extinguish the fire this time without further violence.

Leave – just fly! – you’re the pilot I tell myself, the living violet, not the dried potpourri, nor the owner of any karmic debt. You have nothing to repay or repent. You (I repeat) are in bloom and important, and not to be judged for being lost and distorted.

I cannot stand for being taken (my craft – this vehicle) and internally shriveled up. I am not that crush you once had, I wish to spew, and I don’t any longer blush from that complicated fad that fed me while I ate of you.

And yet, I refuse to hate you. I refuse to allow myself to hate that I hate you, drowning, as I know I would, in obsolescence. I crave independence now like I never have and never expected I could, and although I wish I was not alone, my future looks better, brighter, right… and like it should.

Most, and I’m not nearly most, would crumble as they lose their footing, always two steps back for every one step they refuse to cease on putting down. I find it sad that most would rather be the clown, instead of simply taking steps to move around and find their way to surer ground. It takes time to get it right, I’ve heard it said, but there is never endless time to wait, and hope, and beg for answers to delight themselves in light bulbs right inside their very head. I shake my head.

So, I’ll push myself to lose the fear amongst the crowd of filth my ears are forced to hear and then erase. I’ll appear to shake, because without the words, the voice I cannot make will take my mind off the matter here at stake – which is to say, the future of our bonding that I need to break. And maybe by not speaking you’ll get the message and find the meaning in what I won’t attempt to say, although I’d be straining to keep my voice at bay because the many things I really wish to say would only explode me, implode my tears, and blow you away… So, lest I do you harm, I won’t arm this throat with noise, this tongue with vibration, and I’ll resist the temptation, “Because,” I tell myself… and then I hesitate, exasperated, trying to find the words to state it…

Because not only do you deserve an empty voice, and wordless words, and eyes that speak a language you could never start to read, but you deserve to leave without another part of me to plunder, and beyond that, you deserve nothing more but to forever wonder what I might have done or what I might instead have said: words falling out of me like bullets to be interpreted with that empty understanding in your head, and then, to be swallowed down like pills that fill that void inside your chest. I know you thrive on pain of any kind – and so, to state it simply, in that, I won’t oblige.

I won’t be taken to a place I cannot go. I won’t be drawn into your game, handing out chances like they’re one and the same because they’re not – and they’ve expired. I’ve expired. Every time you lied I knew it was my time to retire from this place of anywhere but my own space. I knew it was time to reclaim the stolen person I became, and I knew if I didn’t it would hurt, and I knew I’d be maimed… and yet, I allowed it this long all the same.

So, as these thoughts are penned without a sound inside the mind I use to redefine this moment for the final time – and all this while the noise I see you make exits your lips, and every excuse I see you miss and every reason you give that I choose to ignore with a gentle spark of future bliss – I finally realise I do actually see through your pungent purpose. I see you decommissioned and losing the race with my permission, and I – that is, the person you have never known and never will – I do enjoy this moment of lingering perfectly calm and still. I’m empowered by the strength of my own peace throughout your shrill. I have grown because I had fallen out of touch with my own way and my own will and it’s a good thing you came to ruin me, because, without that, I would not have emerged so alive and so gracefully skilled: the wordsmith in me, proud in this moment to be aroused enough to self-compose and finally heal.

SPOKEN WORD WOMAN

You might not like to see my fat jiggle, or my butt wiggle, but this body has carried me farther than your giggle ever will.

It might not thrill you, but I’m a no-frills woman who takes what she has and makes with it her own – and lets not pretend, I have more than you know beneath these clothes. There might be rows and rows of dimples and wrinkles and obvious freckles (that to some might be cute) but under these puffy cheekbones is a skeleton I call home, and it’s not yours (thank GOD), but it’s worthy of knowing.

It’s your loss if you choose beauty over brains and heart and THIS thinking mind. I might have a long way to start to be someone you’d find yourself watching through blinds, but I’m a damn sight better than someone without the courage to stand wherever she lands – and if that’s behind, then that’s where you’ll find me. That’s where I’ll sweep my floor and make my bed, and, with pity, watch YOU instead to discover that not everything ‘pretty’ is worth uncovering, or owning, or smothering with pride, because, for those with eyes WIDE open, there’s nothing worse than a soul smashed and dried with a hole that leaks powdered ego, nor the upper-class battering eyelashes of a pointless romantic who would rather own lavish belongings than dance in her heart with far less than what she ever dreamed to start with… and woe to all if she ever had to depart this earth without her heels and her silicone breasts and her lipo-suctioned stomach and thighs beneath that little black dress.

Woe is me for laughing at such perfection, unimpressed.

The truth of where I am in my life, and what I have, and how I give it all when I can to others is what keeps MY story so grand and worth more sand than all the beaches combined, although, in this body, all that matters is INSIDE, and not sun baking, or swimming, or shopping, or dining, or making up lies to refine me. I am THIS, just what you see, and if you don’t see me matter-of-factly then I won’t miss you, exactly.

Oh, and what I also won’t miss will be wishing I’m something more than I am which is smaller than my clothing size – but still ‘too large’ in your eyes… but that’s YOUR lie because you’re controlled through the media and told like a child what you should want and should need – and, furthermore, you are blinded by greed, and blinded by fright, and blinded through – God forbid – actually SEEING.

I ponder what company you will be to yourself in your house or your mansion with nobody else (all alone)… Maybe not now, but just wait for a while and you’ll age, and you’ll moan, and you’ll wish you were at home with your path and your decisions and your personal mission… and I’ll envision (through my second sight: a premonition) a TRUE vision of you enslaved to your fantastical and ‘brave’ dream of nothing but perfection; of washing your life of mistakes like erasing infection… but it’ll all be fake… And, sure, it’ll be your cake and you can eat it too, but don’t go waving it in MY face. I don’t want any of yours, no matter how hungry I feel, and regardless how poor.

You are a disgrace. I don’t need a cake to celebrate my present state or my coming fate. Nor would I offer you a bite from my own plate. The less of you I see the more I satisfy me, and my larger-than-life conscious mind will be FULL for eons more time, which is far, FAR longer than you’ll ever, in your ‘right mind’, be privy, or one day, ‘destined’ to find.

Now that’s a party in my opinion – perfect, infinite, and exquisitely divine.