Adolescence

Adolescence
November 15 2004

Most of all I remember the hunger
The craving for what I knew all along wasn’t blood
Dress in cloaks of need
Dyed in contempt
I will scare people with the extent of my need
None but a mother can give as much
- Or take as much -
I sealed myself shut
So no one would hear
The howling winds of hunger
In the vacuum that was me
I took exquisite pains
To function seamlessly
To feed delicately
When really I needed to gorge
On them
To consume them entirely
To be other than me
And have company inside

I think I was crazed with need
And I called it -aptly -
The Vampire
In curlicues of cruelty
Violence, swiftness, fulfillment
Exhilaration
Not stepping on eggshells
With clogs
And never ever showing anything;
… People would run from me in drones!
It would be the Great Diaspora
Of our Ice Age
They would create camps for refugees
The nuclear space left around me
By the impact
Of what was inside of me
A definition by default
And utter silence
- Made deaf y’all -
I pictured my inner grenades
With bizarre shapes of death

I remember fantasizing for years
About hugs
As if they were amputated limbs
Oh, what would I have done
For an embrace
The right quality
The right blood
The right warmth
Love can’t be ordered
I’ll command what I can
Play with power if it feeds me
For eat I must
I’ll scavenge what I can
I think I even went for the kill sometimes
Yeah, sometimes I killed
But I don’t regret it
They would have hurt me
They wanted something from me
And I got it from them instead
All is fair in love…
I am my own person.

Oh I was such a baby predator
Dangerous because motherless
Do motherless beasts survive in the wild
Or do they bring the wild with them
Wherever they go?

Most of the times I was delicate
Careful of the feelings of others
From being trampled on myself daily
But sometimes the pressure would split bursts in me
And I’d lash out
I think all my youth was an exercise in endurance
Watching a very precarious balance in myself
Nothing was not exhausting.

I wonder now whether tears would have helped
But there is no end to tears
No dykes or dams
Tears are too fluid
Too wet
Hardened feelings, on the other hand
Can be broken into chunks
Silexes
Contained, stored…
As it is tears don’t come easy.


The Vampire is the name
For the need I wouldn’t name
And could not wish away
A self taught cohabitation