It never draws blood even when it pierces through my skin and into my heart. It’s supposed to hurt but it doesn’t. I can hardly tell the difference between touch and tenderness. My sober shaman sterilizes needles in a garage where I lie on top of warm white sheets. Men with medicine and tools never want to leave me alone because I am vacant and beautiful but those things exist separately. I’m ugly because I’m vacant and I’m filled because I’m beautiful. Healer can see every side of me. I remain so still, I’m panicking with a crown of needles sticking out of my head and one in between my eyes.
I’m always doing the wrong thing because I am always on my own. The only people who police me live in my phone. In the canyon, I’m laying on a bed that has seen so many misaligned girls and none of them have ever been in love. I’m here for free. My sober shaman wants to get it right. I could never fall in love with Sober Shaman. It’s not the pain that kills you, it’s asking for help. I’m staring at a crack in the ceiling and thinking about killing time. It just won’t die.
If I didn’t have a phone I would sketch more. I’d carry a pencil with me and draw the shapes of clouds, use my finger to smudge the lead and use the eraser to highlight what I’d overdrawn. Maybe I wouldn’t be so scared to close my eyes and walk around in my thoughts. Everything I’d imagine would be more beautiful and real than what I see now. Even if I carried a camera with me, the image would still be an image. It wouldn’t give me a new imagination, it would be one that was still and frozen. A photo fades, a drawing decays, all things rot and your mind is the only thing that breathes. Once that rots, you die and then there’s no point in how things will be seen because you’ve already seen it. There is no blood flow.
Love would rewire staying here indefinitely. I’m supposed to resolve and exit. I would rather rot slowly into knowing. I know it doesn’t work like this but I’ve never lived before.
The world wants to promise you wellness, everything is designed to move on, everybody is licking their wounds. Death is the only honest question, where nothing can be seen, not the image, not the man, not the self. There’s no healing from that.
Everybody has the same dream. Everybody wants to be a person. I send my sober shaman a hundred dollars and I feel free.
-- Ginger Jones is a poet from California.
