maurice

i am maurice.

i have lost my scissors for the moment, ergo if anything inside my brain wanted to jump out and attack me, i would be defenseless against myself.  but this seems a safe enough topic, mocking myself for my edwardian tendencies--my belief that, no matter what the monstrosities in my head are, if i just behave (in public) like a lady, don't complain, and suffer in silence, one day someone will have to love me.  they'll see this self i've worked so hard to invoke for what it is--monstrous yet fine, beyond its own bounds because huge and ungainly, but fully inhabited, helpless against its own individuality, and therefore worthy, in some ravaged, broken, yet powerful way, of being seen as beautiful...

our struggles aren't the same: i'm not a gay man in edwardian england; i'm a bi woman inhabiting a time in which i could marry just about anything.  my struggle isn't with an illegal identity; it's with the beast locked in the cabinet of my memory.  but in every other way i am maurice: my mind is a brutal, slow-blooming plain--it responds to force, fire and rain--raw-hungering thunder and lightening-like pain--soul gutting the marrow--taught by its flesh--

to accept
no untrue
rest