"Poem"

[ateolf]

She is the girl of my dreams.
I will find her everywhere—
Held by self-disappointment.

This verse lingers in my mind. I don’t know where it came from. I can’t remember when it arrived. It’s always been there—as far as I can tell—surfacing and resurfacing into the periphery of my consciousness. It rests on a loop of tape, somewhere inside of me. My entire life follows its program.
All human activity is controlled by poetry. Some find songs, political slogans, advertising jingles manipulating their will. They are all the same. Whether simple, complex; sophisticated, childish; long, short; good, bad; poignant, dull; poems are the programs underlying our human mechanism. Most pass their lives never hearing those words. I know mine.

She is the girl of my dreams.
I will find her everywhere—
Held by self-disappointment.

While I’ve never heard the words of another, I can sometimes feel their presence just beneath the surface. From time to time, I catch a faint melody humming out the pores of people nearby (for those that are governed by song). I can imagine some might have volumes of poetry dictating an assortment of activity and functions. Obviously, I lack any concrete, physical evidence to support this particular hypothesis, but I do know that my mind only runs one.

She is the girl of my dreams.
I will find her everywhere—
Held by self-disappointment.

Accepting this fact may seem fatalistic [and I would have to concur that the Greeks’ reliance on verse is hardly coincidental], but I’ve come to realize that the problem may just be that nobody knows their poem. I didn’t always know mine. I could hear it, but I didn’t know what it was.

She is the girl of my dreams.
I will find her everywhere—
Held by self-disappointment.

I found her everywhere. I am still finding her (under different names and different outfits), but the results stay the same. I have never held her. It is always myself I am holding. Held. But the disappointment is shared. We are both disappointed with me.
I am not a bad-looking guy, but whenever I find her, meet her, the words flash across the backs of my eyelids. They move into my face, twisting the features to their shape: a hideous deformity. My pores open and the words leak out as pus: “girl,” “I,” “everywhere,” “disappointment.” She reads what I hear. The words trickle down into my throat—the tight loops of their script (I find them to be handwritten) tying it shut. All other words are siphoned out of me. I can’t compete with those two sentences and the new face they have fashioned for me in their own, wrinkled likeness. She reads what I hear. Neither of us likes this poem very much.

She is the girl of my dreams.
I will find her everywhere—
Held by self-disappointment.

I do know my poem. I know what must be replaced. At first, I tried to write my own. I wrote them all down on paper, filling leaf after leaf of worn, crumpled notebooks. On paper they stayed. In my head it remained.

She is the girl of my dreams.
I will find her everywhere—
Held by self-disappointment.

I tried filling my head with other works—works fashioned by fingers more skilled than my own. I read and I read. Many words entered my head. Most were fleeting. Some stayed for a while. Some stayed a long time. There are even some still floating around to this day. None rest in that same deep recess, fitted onto a ribbon of tape, incessantly looping my life to their will.
The old words won’t leave. This is my problem. I must remove them before I can reprogram myself. Realizing it could be dangerous to attempt life unprogrammed even for an instant, I chose an on-hand backup just in case. This is what I wrote.

Without words holding us back
Or their absence a deep rift,
She’ll see me and understand.

I could only hope it would be good enough.

She is the girl of my dreams.
I will find her everywhere—
Held by self-disappointment.

Anatomical charts spread before me, I studied and searched for the word-tape within. It seemed odd that I should be ahead of science, but poems are controlling us all. It quite clearly follows that no scientist to date has had a word-tape permitting its own indiscretion. I consulted with several reputable surgeons, but none would have a thing to do with my proposed treatment. The closest I came to constructive advice or help were a couple of referrals to psychologists, but I could see through the hedging contempt seething off those clinical scrips. I was forced to find less reputable sources of surgical prospects.

She is the girl of my dreams.
I will find her everywhere—
Held by self-disappointment.

For a fee, this doctor would do anything. I think he may have even been a real doctor at some point, or at least spent some amount of time in medical school, had some measure of proper training. I told him what I needed, what to look for. He stamped his cigarette out on the floor, shrugged his shoulders, a nod of the head.
“You know there’s no drugs. Can’t afford the trouble if I get caught. Already enough shit, what with the cutting people under the table.”
I hopped onto his kitchen table. The new poem was safely folded on a small piece of paper tucked gently into my breast pocket.

She is the girl of my dreams.
I will find her everywhere—
Held by self-disappointment.

He spreads out an assortment of tools blurring the line between cutlery and clinicality. At least most of them appear clean, not too much rust. I wonder what use he could have with a fork; but for the most part, his attention remains with the scalpel. Real surgeons use scalpels so I choose not to worry.
He slices me open with a slow, shallow incision down my chest—a slow, deep incision down my chest. The pain is intense. She’s nowhere to be seen, but it feels like we’re meeting all over again: a gaping wound in my chest, the rapid beating of my heart unduly exposed to the festering air haloed about me. As if by switch, my vision goes soft and uneven, yet I don’t lose consciousness. I feel every tear, every slice, and reach up to touch her soft face; but he slaps my arm back down and tells me to keep still.
I regain some clarity and look up. Most of my intestines are pulled out and strewn about me (twined like tape, for a moment I was sure it was poetry rising out from the fat and muscle tissue). Random organs dot the scene. He’s hacking away, tying knots, tossing stuff around, mixing things up just a bit. My liver gets sewn to a kidney (left? I’ve lost track. . . fast hands. . . cup and ball trick) and this new concoction is stuffed inside the duodenum. There is surprisingly little blood.

She is the girl of my dreams.
I will find her everywhere—
Held by self-disappointment.

I know it’s my imagination—a result of the mild shock I’m sure I endured—but I can feel her lying next to me, breath at my throat. Her fingers run across my body, dipping into the newly formed furrows streaming about. I’m paralyzed. For once, I can’t see her. For once, I can feel her touch.
The doctor pushes my head back down. Scalpel in hand, he cracks it open. He tells the old brain surgeons’ joke about scrambled eggs. This puts me at ease. Surely he’s at least been to medical school. He pushes his fingers deep inside. She sinks her fingers deep into the cavity of my chest.

She is the girl of my dreams.
I will find her everywhere—
Held by self-disappointment.

For one brief moment, doctor and girl merge and spin about the room. I am still on the table but I have the doctor’s eyes. I clasp her hands and we dance a slow dance; between my right and her left is the scalpel; between her right and my left is my spleen. The yellow light inside the still blades of the ceiling fan casts us in dim jaundice. Our lips approach, back away. We glide through the air past the icebox and piled dishes—dipping and bobbing in delicate synchronism. The tango: she spins out and I reach back to clip off a few lymph nodes. We meet, eyes lock, our incorporeal bodies pressed tight together.

She is the girl of my dreams.
I will find her everywhere—
Held by self-disappointment.

I have my own eyes. The doctor is still standing, cutting various pieces, stitching various parts. She is still lying next to me, running fingers through clumped hair, stroking my left temple—as if that whole episode never happened. I’m sure it hadn’t. The doctor is singing a little song, shuffling his feet as he works. I’m trying to scream, but the pain is clustering my esophagus. Spots form and fade in front of my eyes. I shut the lids and the words flash again across their backs.

She is the girl of my dreams.
I will find her everywhere—
Held by self-disappointment.

A series of signals: heart, scalpel, hot breath. . . words, tape, electronic drum. . . they pulsate and radiate across my taut flesh (taut where it’s not gouged loose). Heat rains down upon me. The blade of his scalpel spins, but the fan’s’ are still. . . still. Words move. The tape spins.

She is the girl of my dreams.
I will find her everywhere—
Held by self-disappointment.

Lifting my main artery, he hesitates—eyebrows sink and slowly rise again, mouth twists in metaphor of a shrug. He raises his hand and cuts it in half. A gush of tears sprays across the room, dampening his smock.
She whispers into my ear.

She is the girl of my dreams.
I will find her everywhere—
Held by self-disappointment.

Is that a butter knife or some special, surgical tool?
“Close your eyes.”
When they reopen, they confront the small piece of paper with my new poem carefully scripted on the creased surface.

She is the girl of my dreams.
I will find her everywhere—
Held by self-disappointment.

Tears still cling to my face as I look at the doctor with quivering lips.
“Can’t I at least get my $10,000 back?”
A cold, immovable silence stands guard—back turned to the wall—looking, not at me, but I’m framed in its stare.

She is the girl of my dreams.
I will find her everywhere—
Held by self-disappointment.

I walked away with curses under my breath, head staring down at my chest: crossed with yarn-like stitches and duct tape. He’s a charlatan, a fraud. I have heard my words and I will find their source. There is a tape creaking slowly somewhere inside of me. Pay a man to cut you open and he will cut you open. Pay a man to shine a light into your depths and, if he has the light, all money will crumble behind the shadow cast by discovery. I began to make plans of setting up a research program at the local university. Face to the sky, I scattered puddles of tears on the pavement and shoal puddles of blood deep in my guts.
I found her on a street corner. My throat constricted and my breath disappeared as I stood there, hands trembling. She rolled her eyes and walked away as soon as the light changed. I collapsed and crumbled as I lay by the curb, reaching for something to hold. There was only concrete and dirt.

She is the girl of my dreams.
I will find her everywhere—
Held by self-disappointment.

I found her everywhere, but I could never find those words that guided me to her. And it’s not her rejection that rips me apart and feeds my disappointment. I’m disappointed that I fall for her every time, over and over, tracing the tape in its unending circle of failure and misery.

She is the girl of my dreams.
I will find her everywhere—
Held by self-disappointment.