Exit, Pursued By A Bear

Our world is a strange one. That really does go without saying.

This is the world where greed, revenge and sex are our gods, and fame the alter we worship at, degrade ourselves even mutilate ourselves till we are only desperate pieces of unwritten pages lost to the fire, screaming as everything we ever thought we knew was entinguished and stamped out, ground to dust under a creul steel boot.
Then you have people like me who think they have no one to listen to, to believe in, to drink in as a fountain of sacred knowledge, poisoned tree of mocking flesh fruit. I'm the girl who got too wild and was "get thee to a nunnery'd". I rebelled and was passed off as insane to avoid the scandal. I'm begining to be Frances Farmer.
You see?

Bitter still as I am, bound to reality, even as I goad myself into the ether, try to force my crippled brain to beat it. I am fasinated my sensation, obcessed by my own pain, pulverized by this latest thing, each and every day, I need it like i need a hole in the head. Of which I have ever dire need. I looked in the nightmare box, and all I saw was the ghost of me.

I need to create the music to soundtrack my acid dreams. If theres' a chain of blank smiling paper dolls, who march serenly on, not knowing how thin thier truth is that can be ripped to shreds so easily and kissed by the wind of all four corners of the world, I beg to stop sheparding on. If i can be a bon vivant, babble and travel and do it all, rip myself free and devour my plain limbs. Bite down on the bullet, as the cut me off. Cut me free.

I want to be a wealthy, obnoious weirdo. A cult figure with a lisense to vulgarity, fasinating, captivating and unable to look away. I'll drink, curse and swear, I 'll insult, I'll create. I'll love, I'll dream, I'll run off in my patent leather boots.

But if I move out, can I still dream away of high ways and madness? Can I still lose my mind in runaway hopes? And write my fasinating biography for when I become a deluded Neely O'Hara star? Remember me already! I'm somebody. Or maybe that's only in my mind, I have no idea as to what it feels to think as somebody else. If I'm a paper doll, plain white ripped paper, I'll deal in the traffic of whimsy and whip smarts, doodle full body tattoos, so there's no denying what I am.
I'm not a good role model. Not somebody you want to mess with. I want it all right now down to pain and grit and tears and virtue. I want the rocker and the leather jacket and the peach silk ball gown, Not my misbigotten evil sister who every sees as potential, bait for rebellion and adventure. Sail the seven seas in gladness.

But these nights, I tiptoe downstairs in my watermelon party dress and a conical birthday hat, bright and beloved and sit it the dark kitchen drinking ginger ale out of a champagne glass. I sit still in the dark in tears, watching the portait of total despair and sadness, the renoir girl drink and drown in salt. I don't know why I cry. I just can't do anything else. I can't even breathe as I watch myself from outside the walls, I'm a stranger I don't recognize and I want the girl to go.
I sit on the steps and watch the night race by through the picture window. If i stop thinking realitionallly, I can believe that they're all racing off the save me, but no one ever comes. I'm cold all the time. I'm boilng in the oven. I'm done. I hold myself 'cause no one else will.
I try to hold on.
I'm slipping...

I can resist anything...but temptation. But I've never know myself to be tempted. I've just begun to wander the desert, I set out 40 days ago, but I emerge no wiser. Only that much bitter for the effort to understand. I belittle others for lack of intelligence but drown in mine own. It doesn't make me smarter, bitterer or prettier, just chutes and ladders as I head back to start. I've been here so long I recognize the trees.

My grandmother gossips in apple kuchen german in the next room and it fades to dulcet tones. I only knew what to say. I can't ever voice my ambitions in words when I spend my life devouring and committing them to my archives. I just don't know anything.
I just know everything. But I can't sort it out. Living is becoming a dizzy dream , the worlld like a veil over true reality as I spin to oblivion round and around on the carousel, I'm getting less mature ansd stable with age. One day I'll wake up and forget how to care for myself. I can feel it coming. I'm just so weak, meek, so gauche.
I'm awkwardnes personified but it feels like heaven.

Morning is a dream, and ripping pages of the calender of borrowed time is like ripping my paper heart to phoenix pieces, my nadir, base memorial.
If I only I could rise again as I once was safe, confident and stable. Before I was pieces that forgot to fit together.

I had a dream that I was a sort of killer. In a white dress, I woke up in my bed drowsily in the early morning as the sun started to rub the last fragments of sleep from its eyes, and wandered in the bathroom squinting in the artifical light. I sqeeze the toothpaste tube, holding out my plastic brush, but all that comes out is organs and innards, a mess of spare parts scarlet and guts. But there's laughter. Someone is laughing as I watch in silent shock. This pretends to be real but it does a better job existing than it does in mocking me. Laughter drives me into insantity and I've forgotten how to read, how to count how to need. Blue eyes adjust to the bitter glare, and I see my other hand holds a knife. It drips in blood. So much I'm drowning with no time for a caucus race. But the blood, is revealed to belong to me. I'm just a gaping hole. A wound dripping blood from my own shiny glinting knife. The laughter is coming from me.

What's that knife?
You smile at me.