I was to start this year at war.  I swore I needed it. Really.  It’s been Baghdad inside me, at least since the year genocide donned a cocktail mask and rode bombs into the downtown core cooing ‘Don’t mind me, I’m freeeedom!’. 2003. Fuck.  A whole generation of baby memories grew up in that time and it’s like all they know is crumbly, crumbly chaos everywhere in the land of me, myself and fucking I. I’m full of little despots of emotion that need to fucking go. I put them in power, their kingdoms are theirs because I kicked the keys their way.

I needed them: without them I wouldn’t exist. 2003 was just round 1 of mortar shells making love to my face. the perpetrators poking me in the eye as my world caught fire. I didn’t always know what to say. I was 17, no family, no one to speak for me.   A holy mess was hitting me every which way, and I was trying to hug it. I was a little kid holding an AK-47, and all I could do was stand there and dance with it.  Those moments gave me parts of myself I didn’t know existed. Mutations of sadness to calm me, Thor hammers to the face if you’re in my way, the ability to fragment and have my game face be my everything.

born in a spray of
swollen knees
blind hope and
measureless belief

These despots, they helped me cope. They carried the day; so I gave them control of parts of me, like parents. But every once in awhile I’d go walk around me, and they would have a knife party, waving their little shiv as if it was a sword.  They’d stab my shin, and go for the belly button. They weren’t going to land any mortal wounds. Their terror was tiny, they were tiny tyrants. But that land, that make-up of downtown core me was theirs.  Like child warriors, “war/life”couldn’t be seen as anything other than ‘Oh, fuck fuck fuck fuck…”  They were born out of weakness and roared once; but I let them become dictators because I feared life without them. So I disassociated, I lived somewhere besides myself. I was outside my head, I was feeling shades of something, and eventually I was dead. The despots tore me apart.

soon taught to learn but with no task
beyond a thousand indispensable distractions.

So, war. Because as the Born Gold lyrics keep booming to me, I realized a year ago,

you’re so cruel to yourself
and thinking is unbearable

I rallied the troops. I shouted for all the parts of me that would find bloodshed sexy if I asked them. I shouted for months. Nothing. I coaxed them with chocolate milk, titty shows, and long weekends of sex to butter them up. Silence.

Until one day this month I saw myself in a storefront window shouting, seething over a minor slight. I couldn’t calm down,  I was just scared. I forgot that was a way to feel real. And it dawned on me: I wasn’t a person, but a collection of tiny tyrants trouncing the world. I am anger, stoicism, sadness, in all the feeble ways. I am a diaspora of a person, all the pieces of me, my army, ran for the hills rather than try to build a green zone in this Baghdad of a fucking heart I have.

I took a walk around me. And I saw that all those despots I was going to nuke to nevermore, their kingdoms bit the dust. The despots though were everywhere. They’d multiplied like pubic lice, multitudes of them everywhere like little annoyances on the vast landscape. And their fiefdoms were two feet by two feet; yet still they protected it by stabbing at the space around their shadow, sometimes lopping off a toe. A fatwa against themselves. It was a sea of sad. Child leaders, from my child-days, weren’t meant to build countries.

All I wanted to do was hug them, not beat them with a battalion.

but don’t speak ill of the dead
just do until you heal”

13

Add to the story...