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Domestic Incendiaries |
My bedroom corners are a minefield, an arsenal of hidden weapons, a warehouse of dreams and
visions and nightmares…
There are bombs all over my house - little cherry bombs in closet corners; hand grenades with missing pins
tucked behind the sofa; time detonated weapons ticking in the backs of drawers;
deadly emotional viruses in my computer.
The dust bunnies are in secret alliance with the arms dealers in the basement. They smuggle the weaponry in their apparently harmless clouds of nothing that finally amounts to something.
The arms dealers in my basement know all my weaknesses. They collaborate nightly with the fiends loosed from my subconscious while I’m busy dreaming. They draw pictures of the past that are cleverly disguised as the future. They are fluent in every tense of my life.
The past dreams of the future that can die over and over again.
The present dreams can be drowned in an instant by a flood from the past.
And the future that could be, is continually rewritten; adjusted by the memory of failures
gently reawakened.
Maybe I’ll just move again, leave behind everything that could hold a weapon of personal destruction -
the leather boots, the old favorite skirt, the shredded jeans, the chair,
the coffee cup, the picture in the frame, the postcard and the birthday card,
the pack of condoms, the little tin,
the pair of stockings in the back of the drawer,
the box of water colors, the half finished novel, the box of letters,
the photos at the bottom of the plastic bin,
and the bed,
definitely leave the bed.
Reinvent myself.
A new career,
a new identity,
new friends and lovers,
new stories…
new stories…
Making new stories is the hard part. That’s when the dust bunnies begin their mission. No matter how much
I continually leave behind, it’s the stories that always trap me. I am, after all, just a collection of stories,
a subjective history made objective in my mind, which always traipses along behind me. And once I've left everything yet again, there is nothing to bear witness to the stories. No one that has been there to see. And I become my own fantasy of myself even to.
My reality slips away and the fiends meet with the arms dealers in the basement and the dust bunnies begin to gather in anticipation of new assignments.
Nothing to do but clean the closet, move the bed, and vacuum.
copyright 2012
Cindy
Weinstein |
