TO THE WALL

By Jan Martin Smith

The feel of the metal on her arm, the biting of the steel.  If she pulls hard, the skin rolls up on her wrist, the bones scream.  She is chained to the wall.

Her wrist bones are gaunt, and her hand shows the wear of time.  There are scars from times come and gone.  These hands have caressed a weary brow, they have clasped to a child who may have otherwise ran into the way of danger.  These hands have pressed into her eyes and pulled her own hair.  These hands have flailed the air, and been raised to heaven to understand why.  They have been fists and they have been chewed until they bled.

But nothing is like the feel of the metal against her arm, the restraint that has come and gone with time.  With her eyes closed she can feel the affliction that put them there, that she self imposed upon her soul.  She can see the vow that she made and to which she adhered her entire life.  The glint of the sun from the chains that bind can also blind.  Your eyes can not see, will not see.

She rests on that wall.  She leans into it, she knows it well.  She has beaten it with those hands, and she has clawed it until weary, she has tried to climb it to no avail, she is chained to it, of her own mind.  She is afflicted.

There are times when the chains of the wall are longer, are looser, but they are forever upon her arms, her wrist that is scarred and worn.  She has pulled at it until the blood ran warm down her and she dipped her fingers in the pool and marked her face as a warrior would, and bravely continued on in her battle for life, for sanity and more. 

No one can understand this dance or this wall.  No one can see the affliction, she smiles and she laughs, the mocking laugh of one who sees the world through eyes that are wise from knowledge obtained from blood and pain. 

On the given day, when she puts the key into this shackle and she is released, she will float to the top, and go high, high away, and be free of the affliction and the pain and the blood shed from her heart and soul to abide by a promise and a vow that to her mattered.  She walked on a path less traveled, yes, she read the fucking book.  Not a martyr, but rather afflicted to the end.

On the halfway journey, she thought that she was okay, on the halfway journey, the assessment was that it was okay.  It was not.  So, lean into it.  Keep your armor on, and find what you can for now.  This is your choice.  No one holds the key but you.

Random

Many nights of her life, she has the same feeling, the incompleteness.  The search in her soul and her mind for the thing that will make her whole.  If you plant a seed in the ground it will surely grow to a beautiful thing, but you have to know what the seed should be.  Therein lies the problem.  She has never known what to grow.

Sometimes she looks around her and it all seems so pretty, this world of hers, so clean and new.   But, she is not looking at the weeds. There is pride somehow and she feels a swell, but just a quickly, she can feel incomplete.  She can see the cracks in it all, the soiled places in the walls of her life.  What kind of paint then?  What covering would you pick? 

Just as roots grow and twist, ever encroaching on the good, pushing forward and destroying whatever is in their path, so have the people done to her along her way.  They are small things to begin with, they are not significant, but they soon become bigger and wider and before she knows the cement of her soul is cracked or the foundation of her life has become unsettled and she is insecure.  They are gaping, gasping, mewlings and they take, and take.  They do NOT give back.  She only knows this when she cannot walk, and she cannot see.  She becomes blind because her vision has been given away, she has lost her sight.  She becomes deaf because she refused to hear.  She heard what she wanted to hear.  She hit herself up side her own head and it was hollow.  She blacked her own eyes, and laughed into her hands.  Nothing changed.  She hears the one who mimics, the "evil voice" and has to run and hide inside herself, jump from the car.  Just jump and roll, right?  it hurt like hell.

That same noise, over and over and over and over.  Is it a bark, or a crunch or a snap or a pop.  Over and over and over.  Redundant, listen smarty pants, listen, don't you hear that?  That same old shit?  over and over?  Crazy?  Of course you are!  You nutcase, that is why they come and sit on your back.  That is why they are drawn to you.  Mewling and crying and sniffing, leaving trails of snot on you, and you, feeling all sanctified and justified sitting there in their snot and tears, lost.  Blind because you would not see, and deaf because you only hear what you want to hear.  Your back is broken and you did not step on the crack, so fuck it all.

Did you really put on your turn signal to go around the curve?  You idiot you must think more clearly than that.  You must put your arm out the window too.  My Gawd.