--- title: I wanted to tell you something genre: verse id: i-wanted-to-tell-you-something toc: "I wanted to tell you something" project: title: Autocento of the breakfast table class: autocento ... | I wanted to tell you something in order [to][] | explain the way I feel about the [Universe][], | its workings, etc. But I couldn't [yesterday][] | ---I'm sorry---I wanted only to [ball][] | myself up and cry all day. It was the [sixteenth][] | day in a row this happened to me, and to [be][] | more than two weeks waiting to cry is, | especially when, the whole time, I wasn't able to, | absolutely horrible. It was no sweet sixteen, | I'll tell you that much. Unless at yours, the Universe | kept telling you to quit having such a ball | and that you should have died, like, yesterday. | At first, it feels like you're winning---that yesterday | you really were meant to die, but since you still _are_, | you beat the system somehow. But the Universe bawls, | "No, I meant you should've crawled into | a hole and fucking _died_!" And then the Universe | punches you right in the gut, something like sixteen | times, and all you can think is, "Some sixteenth | birthday! Maybe I will go die in a hole." Yesterday, | at times like this, is a luxury the cruel Universe | refuses to give you. This is when it's a pain just to _be_, | when that Marvell line about "[rolling our stuff into one ball][Marvell]" | just seems glib, when you don't want one body, let alone two. | Something else that may come as a surprise to | you: over the past more-than-a-fortnight, these sixteen | days, I've had nothing to eat but crackers and a cheese ball. | (That's not entirely true---yesterday | I had some candy, peppermints and Jujubes.) | Maybe this is why I'm so mad at the Universe--- | because all it has ever wanted, this Universe | that gave me life, fed me from its breast til I was two, | and even before that, made a place in which I could be--- | all it's wanted was for me to take the sixteen | steps to sobriety, fold the Eight-Fold Path over yesterday | and step around it lightly, as I would an exercise ball, | but the problem is, dear Universe, there's no way I could be | something as hard as all that, to wake up yesterday | morning, stretch over my sixteen selves, bound out like a ball. [to]: poetry-time.html [Universe]: initial-conditions.html [yesterday]: exasperated.html [ball]: ouroboros_memory.html [sixteenth]: sixteenth-chapel.html [be]: love-as-god.html [Marvell]: http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/marvell/coy.htm