A Child of God

When I was a child I wish they hadn’t encouraged my greatest aspirations:

-being the first female president

-being a renowned science fiction author

-being an elemental poetess

-a recipient of the Pulitzer Prize

-being the next Picasso or Van Gogh

I wish they had told me to save my hands for manual labor,

I wish they had warned me I was prematurely wearing them out and wearing them down every time I picked up a Prismacolor or Sharpie, or a pen or a pencil to scrawl out the useless bowels of my soul.

I wish they had told me to save my hands for doing dishes and data entry.

And to stop making so many faces

Or else my forehead would wrinkle before thirty. 

Because nobody likes contending with an intelligent unhappy woman.  Ever.

I wish they had warned me that I was never going to know what ‘family’really meant.

Musicians, they had tried to warn me, about centerfold angels and not being able to drive 55 or vacationing down in the The Gulf of Mexico.

The Musicians, they had attempted to caution me about pink houses and Jane’s addiction. 

The Musicians, they sing chords & chorus of the Godhead, they warn all of us of the world we have trapped them in.  Their siren bellows lamenting all of humanity, knowing, that deep down inside, we’re all like lit matchsticks, crumbling down to ash and smoke.  Endeavoring to grasp the ungraspable.

When I was a child,

I made up rituals and songs.  I sang about Dodo birds without knowing that once, indeed, there had been an actual Dodo bird.  In my song, its plumage was that of a rainbow…

But there is much that as a child that I wasn’t told.  And much of what I was told as a child, was wrong.

Truth is a splinter that can’t be removed.  Truth is gin to the alcoholic.  Truth is an impacted tooth.  Truth, hurts.

The grand deception can be as simple as the bedtime story you heard as

a child.

Perhaps we never grow up, we just age.