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Escape

Walked down today. Heart pumping, eyes flicking, hands shake as tucked away, hidden in coat sleeves. Scared, worried, paranoid! Hands, with no faces, grab me, hit me, hurt me. Feet with no bodies kick me, trip me. Hand entwined in my hair, pulling. Too many faces, blurring together, unable to see. Sound emitting coming from blurred, spinning faces, laughing, name calling, mocking. Walk through, eyes nervously waiting, for another fist flying towards me, body tensed waiting for impact, for pain. None appears. Confusion adds to my fear. I look around again. Who? Why? More laughter, taunting me. Laughing as I flinched. I make myself walk, begging myself not to run. Forbid myself from crying. Trying not to scream. Refuse to appear weak, try not to give them what they want. Pathetic, I see myself reflected in their eyes. Different! Alone! Prey! I don’t want to be the victim. But I don’t want to be the attacker either. Just want to be me. Even as I retreat physically, I retreat further mentally. Hide in the only place they leave me, the only place they can’t find me, hunt me. My mind. Safe, warm, accepting. The total opposite of them.

They feel no remorse for what they do. To them I have no identity. All they know is that I’m not like them, a freak. To them I am the thing that makes them look good. “Hit the freak, hit the freak!” instant popularity.

I went to get a plaster, but instead I found pain killers. I sat there for half an hour, silently, crying, wondering. Just holding them in my hand. My own fear held me back. I’ll search more, has to be another crack, anything I can pry open, escape from this life. My life! Time!

Me

You do not do, you do not do

Any more, black shoe

In which I have lived like a foot

For thirty years, poor and white,

Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.

You died before I had time---

Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,

Ghastly statue with one gray toe

Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic

Where it pours bean green over blue

In the waters off the beautiful Nauset.

I used to pray to recover you.

Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town

Scraped flat by the roller

Of wars, wars, wars.

But the name of the town is common.

My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.

So I never could tell where you

Put your foot, your root,

I never could talk to you.

The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.

Ich, ich, ich, ich,

I could hardly speak.

I thought every German was you.

And the language obscene

An engine, an engine,

Chuffing me off like a Jew.

A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.

I began to talk like a Jew.

I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna

Are not very pure or true.

With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck

And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack

I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been sacred of you,

With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.

And your neat mustache

And your Aryan eye, bright blue.

Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You----

Not God but a swastika

So black no sky could squeak through.

Sylvia Plath

I like a look of agony

I LIKE a look of agony,

Because I know it ’s true;

Men do not sham convulsion,

Nor simulate a throe.

The eyes glaze once, and that is death.

Impossible to feign

The beads upon the forehead

By homely anguish strung.

Emily Dickinson