The capacity for change is desirable;
I had not recalled the presence of such a capacity within myself.
My recent rediscovery of my own ability to feel calm,
to reassure myself of my own existence,
has been a pleasant shock, although noted only
by very experienced observers.
The green still gleam with speckled smiles, grinning gracious
that notetaking has become routine
that they know all there is to know of this species
that they might now put it to sleep,
tired of watching its frantic tantrums--must they all do this!
They know not that it has once again slept, for days now,
the innocent, the unpolluted sleep of happy death.
Once again, after a suspension of rest
that could have lasted years.

I found this documentary, she told me, with footage of
emotionally traumatised apes. They spent all of their time
sitting in corners, hitting themselves.
Don't you see, what we're taught? If we're caught young
anything is possible. Any personality can be molded and reformed,
any budding resistance corroded and built into something
not terrifying, but commonplace. Suffering is commonplace.
        Your suffering,
it's not inspiring, as you seem to think. It is not the progeny
of a thousand significant sorrows. Your tears
are merely tears.
But how can you account
for the circle around you? To what can you attribute this admiration?
If you loved yourself, you would tell me, I am worth it.
I have earned this with my grieving.
But you do not.

The days roll over and fresh tensions
mount and mount me
and the sleep of someone in love becomes the sleep of medication
and I remember nights of rotating and staring,
waiting and wishing it were possible to drown, safely,
in the sink.
My hands are smooth, these cells are new.
These microbes, germs, don't know me yet.
Our eyes are virgins,
broken apart with every waking. It's so hard to be careful.
So hard to think that one's misery amounts to so little.
It's counterintuitive; I'd like to be wrong.
Perhaps if I found what I sought there would only be
another of me to crowd this place,
already too full of my organised schizophrenia
She'd have learned to be a man,
to face me to the wall and thrash me until I learned it.

You're beautiful; you are, all of you, distressingly lovely.
Perchance your most enchanting quality
is your certainty that there will be one who hears.
Your eyes don wedding veils.
You leave me, always, to sleep.