they pick the times when i'm most weak to pounce. not just weak in emotions, but also when i'm zoned out on cold medicine and wandering about in a daze, not really wanting to interact but morely wanting to explore enough to find a safe corner and curl up and sleep for a few hours. when i can't really do much of anything about what they're doing; when i'm too weak to slam fists into walls.

this is my silent rage.

if they knew me they'd run and hide, or ship me off somewhere to get naived on pills and to come home wearing bright pinks and blues. that won't happen. i won't let them crush me as hard as they try because i've seen too many people come out of the machine; changed forever. i won't let it happen and yet it's harder and harder to resist. maybe there's something in the food they give me. they attack when my defenses are down as any good predator should.

i am not a phase.

i wake up, and find myself in a cage. the cage is being loaded into a truck that is driving many many miles or so it seems and it doesn't look like they're letting me out until i reach my destination. they've pounced; it's too futile to do anything but sleep. and so i sleep, in the corner of my little cage, my little stifling cage, my little choking cage. when i wake up, i realize i have made a mistake. i have only weakened myself more and have only now realized that then there was no too late. but now there is. two men drag me out of the cage, and kick me to weaken me more. their job is mostly done; they are the breakers. they break me like they would a horse. and i'm not outside, but i'm in a giant indoor junkyard with blindingwhite walls and people walking around, broken as i. we are all angry in our little land, but there's nothing we can do about it. this is our silent rage.

i wander through the maze of old television sets and refrigerators and shopping carts and cars and childrens' toys, lost eternally and yet knowing exactly where i am.

i am where usfolks come to die.

no amount of screaming would change it, and so i am as silent as when i was born and had the realization that they weren't going to let me back where i came from. the air is thick with the smell of sad resignation. and silent rage.

i take a wrong turn somewhere, maybe i was supposed to take a left at that old broken lamp with the tattered lampshade, i don't know. (some of these old things seem so sad.) and i take the wrong turn and see a machine, pouring out thick choking grey smoke that's licking the white walls and staining them with its colour. it's a huge industrial-age monster, so appropriate that it seems to have been built back when the children were having to go to schools mandatorily. but that is not my problem. it has a belt,moving slow, lethargic. and hundreds of usfolks are being shoved onto it with cattle prods, and it takes them through the machine, and they come out the other side, and they don't care anymore. they have bottles of the stuff they're taking out of them; rosy mist and greenish mist and indigo mist with lables like joy and love and sadness. these usfloks coming out of the machine, they get in their own trucks and drive away. there are cages in the backs of all of them. they all look the same. i realize what they mean to do with me, and i collapse into a pile of tattered little treasures with stories to tell, and i cry. it begins to rain in the vast white room. my eye makeup is running down my face.

i wake up screaming and sweating and realize that every image is true.