Guilt

A Poem by OwenT

Sometimes it is a fight against my consciousness. That reeling hydra with a hypnotic gaze, that thing that makes you question. I’m afraid of it, I think. I try to kill it the best I can. I need to listen to music, a conversation, white noise, anything. I need to get high and sink into a comfortably dulled numbness. It’s like I can drown it out for a while, diverting tremendous aqueducts to crash a murky dopaminergic swamp down upon it, silencing its wailing calls. It wants me to reflect, to ponder, to hurt. I tell myself that I don’t have time for that, right now. I’m too busy to be turned to stone via analysis of my soul. I need to analyze chlorophyll spreadsheets, molecular symmetry, teleost hormone cycles, ANOVAs, functional RNAs. There is no room in that to ponder the loss of her warm cheek underneath my palm, the smell of her burnt sugar perfume. There is no room in that to consider the horrible wraith-coldness I feel when I cram a miscellaneous them-shaped peg into a her-shaped hole. I’ll get around to it eventually. I know one day I’ll burn through my excuses and the tap will run dry and the hydra will rise out of the pit I put it in. With great soaring wings it will darken the sky and dominate the factions that govern my mind. I hope I will be brave enough to embrace it, to say I’m sorry for how I rejected the great gift of being human in favor of base reptilian numbness. I hope it will be a merciful ruler when it’s time comes, and does not leave me torn apart with fang and claw.

That’s what I hope when I’m lying awake and my internal judge slams the neurological gavel. I see with perfect clarity all the lies I tell myself melt into a pitiful pool. When he grips with iron fingers and strips the bark away to expose the soft, rotten wood in my consciousness. Crawling with earwigs and isopods that whisper the comforting lies into my belly that prevent guilty bile from rising in my throat. He holds a magnifying glass and wrinkles his nose as he burns them into rancid chitinous smoke.