Grace Royal: Brain Itch

(explanations, of sorts)

I’m lying on Keats’ wide-world shoreline, escaping the plastic bag crackle,
the hand dryer buzz, the barbed wire bickering that wraps round my eardrums:
if I call it mindfulness, it’s an acceptable coping mechanism.
I’m enjoying the silenced sea and the muted seagulls and the absolute desolation,
when a head curls round my bedroom door and I want to bite,
my mouth bloody with get out, get out, get out, and leave me alone, but I don’t.
I put on the real-person smile and answer the real-person questions
only a child’s scissors hint of the knife edge under my tongue.
Then I’m back in the room and the sea is too far away
and I shake my fingers, shake my legs: magic spells against the violence.

***

All the world’s a circus show and I’m dressed as the clown on stilts
and my stumbling isn’t just for the performance. I’m allergic to the face paint
and I’m not even funny and my skin feels heavy and the costume is itchy.
I’ve got this painted on smile and the people are loving it
– this is what they want, after all – and I’m just thinking: clowns are awful;
your traditional white-face-paint-oversized-smile-red-nose-bright-and-noisy clowns
make me want to die – and yet – and yet – here’s a whole audience
finding it absolutely palatable – but not only palatable, genuinely preferable
to my other faces and this is what they want: me in the clown costume, me on the stilts,
me, circus performing – and it shouldn’t surprise me anymore, but it does.

***

My body is not my home – it’s a shipment container –
and I’m just a collection of ghost-selves or should-be-dead-selves,
rattling round in this metal box in the middle of the ocean
but someone’s graffitied eyes onto the doors of the box
and it’s sparked a bad case of facial pareidolia
and now everyone’s gendered the box, put pressure on the box,
put expectations on the box, wants love from the box
but I’m just a tangle of ghost-selves who do not belong,
a tear in the universe, looking on through hastily sketched-on eyes
and failing terribly to meet the demands placed on metal.

***

(I’m experimenting with the distorted face in the mirror,
pulling the muscles in the right directions, practicing putting responses in the right order)

Brilliant (I say) good, thanks (I say) good morning everyone, you are now under exam conditions–

(I run through the expression options, try out the smiles, check the resting faces, but
honestly, I’m just trying not to lose Health Points or to die only two minutes in.)

(See, I’ve always been terrible at pressing A and forward and looking at the screen
and this latest edition of Twenty-Something-Adult really isn’t my sort of game.)

(There’s a cheat sheet out there somewhere, but I’m too caught in pressing A then B)

warm smile, I’m good, thank you – forward – GAME OVER –

(you forgot again, didn’t you. It’s A, B then Circle: warm smile, I’m good, thank you, how are you? )

***

I dress myself like a hypothetical poetry anthology – trust me, it helps with the itch:
1.  The Yellow Summer Dress: an exploration of nostalgia and a blatant rejection of growing up.
2.  The Lightning Tights The Lobster Socks, and The Moon Shirt: an ode to the Beloved Ghosts.
3.  The Red-Checkered Shirt with The White Collar: a dodging of reality via discreet cosplay.
4.  The Grey Skirt and Snowflake Cardigan: an allusion to Villette, implying a sad, unreliable speaker.
5.  The Jeans, Denim Shirt and Stetson Necklace: notes on finding calm in a lonely, fearful world.
6.  The Pink Fur Coat and ‘Honey Bunny’ Sweater: a celebration of the nineteenth-century coquette.
7.  The Eye-Miniature Necklace: a private, untranslated joke between the speaker and the work.
8.  The Blue Jumpsuit and Red Turtle Neck: a metaphor for the speaker’s perceived level of scrutiny.
9.  The Rainbows: an unexpected wisp of otherwise lost hope.

***

Once, in the hospital, I was asked to write all the horrible things I thought about myself on a balloon,
to blow it up, then burst it in order to free myself from the bad perceptions I held about my person.
Weird, I thought, but six weeks locked in one building had me willing to play
with the prescribed metaphors. I covered every inch of that balloon
in every bad thing I could fit; I blew it up, burst it, and
held my own wrinkled corpse in my hands.
Was that freeing?
the kind therapist asked, and I said yes,
because I wanted a good grade in eating disorder recovery;
yes, because it was a delightful act of violence against what I am,
yes, because it might be the closest I can get to holding my own shell.
Yes, I said, because time had passed and because yes is usually the right answer in these situations.

***

I understand what you see: Exhibit G, One Face, One Body, One Tangible Entity,
but your eyes are too kind; your eyes are creating what’s best to see.

I apologise, deeply, for the delusion and hold out the truth of it:

I’m just an eclectic collection of short stories,
a Word Document of vaguely connected prose;
I’m Pieces from a Shattered Mirror;
I’m Tamar, I’m Sophie, I’m Chloe;
I’m Lio, I’m Cressida, I’m Raffy, I’m Geordie;
I’m Amelie, Leandra, Adrian or Joni;
I’m just playing at Ginevra or Robin or Lucy;
I’m just the speaker saying, I know, I know, I know,
while bumping into her own face in a mirror maze.

What I mean to say is: Exhibit G is an impossible rendering.

What I mean to say is, if the body was a book, then it would be a battered
paperback edition, the title is unfitting, the blurb totally deceptive about its innards.

***

live in the moment
is the mantra I’ve been advised to internalize,
so I escape to the sea and look at the churning waves,
the streaks of blue and green, white and grey, the undertones of purple,
and I think about how this would look, rendered with colouring pencils –
surreal, maybe, too bright, maybe; and I think, what could I write
about my desire to be in those waves right now, something about cold thick water
or something about being a seafarer, scared of the ocean;
and I think, what would happen if I brought Tamar here, or Chloe
or Ginevra – where would that go, what then?
I drop the mantra into the water, let it be changed by the waves;
I watch it take on a coating of seaweed, see it bejeweled with bright anemones:
live in the moment
of your own crafting:
reject reality:
choose (brighter) fictionality.

***

My heart’s doing the rollercoaster ride thing, loop-de-loop, big climb, big drop, the world blurred, a sickness in my stomach, the thrill of awareness I might actually pass out. I don’t need to spend money on a theme park ticket – just place me in a situation for an hour or so and there you have it – same sensation, none of the price. It’s a survival tactic, this trial run of death, this magical ability to sleep, this GET ME OUT OF HERE bleat in my head. Still, it never saves me, just leaves me fastened on a rollercoaster with an endless track. I can’t adjust to the movement, can’t escape from the moment, and around me, every sign, every smiling person is reminding me that I’m supposed to be having the time of my life. All I can feel and all I can think of is my heart ghosting and the beat of every detail I discovered when researching rollercoaster deaths in preparation for the ride.

***

I want to press my fingers into the top of my skull, burst it like satsuma skin,
peel it away, then squash the fruit into pulp, let it rot.
I want to shed myself of this dirty, grimy self,
carve out my stomach, scrub my mind with a wire brush.

I want to do all the bad things, but instead, I go down to the ocean.

Let it be mine, I say. Let it be silent besides the low-level churn of the sea.

Let the waves hate the shore and the sky be rotten grey
– that’s it – I gift the waves with my rage.

Now, let it be sunset, the sky be purple and orange, the whole world a pink-tinted calm
– there, that’s it – I gift the clouds my ice shards of hope.

Now, let it be sunrise, the easeful time before the tide turns
– there, let me breathe.

Let me breathe – let me be – just the ocean and me and the quiet – for a moment,
let me wrap the world round my fingers, bend it to myself
– let it be mine – just let me be.