Posted on February 9, 2010 - by Rasham

4th Step

4th Step

I know why you wear your glasses to bed: you’re afraid you wont see what’s coming when you’re asleep, that if you open your eyes and have a moment to react you may react wrongly because you cant see…I know this…I watch you sleeping, I see those eyes moving in the space on your face while you wait at the edge of dreams for a reason to engage your reflexes and then boom! Too late; the nightmare is real and blood is already pouring; if only you had been wearing your glasses…

And what diet have you consumed that has left you so bloated with fear? Who has your heart in a bind and who before has pricked it a million times with nasty needles of demented perfection? You seek approval in all forms, wanting to be wanted by all people in all ways. And when you fail to find that source of acceptance you suffer a gentle stab, you  feel it sink in and slide around, you feel it grow around your heart and change you, you feel it arrest your thoughts and turn them so that they are unfamiliar and throbbing like your pulse that sets the tone for your prize of resentment.

You will cry now, wont you? Remembering the pleasant taste of freedom, a memory vague and teasing, like the flavor of strawberry licked from the fingers of your vacant sweetheart. Why do you source the misery from which you run? Is there a place to phrase the pickled prayers of a self-anointed princess? You are nothing, you think. You have nothing and you come from people who have less still. So go, then, leave this world like you’ve wanted before; the skin of your wrists is already written with scar tissue gossip of a lonely end.

And to whom are you now attached, I wonder? From whom do you leech the vibrant energy of approval? Does he say ‘I love you?’ And what do you reply? You might sit still and soften those eyes behind the forged glass that shields your sinister intentions; so afraid to be alone you keep him with your smile all the while you silently repeat the mantra of mortal insecurity in your mind: ‘please don’t leave me, please don’t leave me, please don’t leave me….’ You’re so afraid to be alone! The form of the man is no matter so long as he craves you, cradling your virginity or catering to your finite innocence with the force of his fist; to you it is no matter. The kind one thinks of himself the answer to your history of abuse, the ill-tempered one sees you as weak and sees him a savior who violently demands recognition of his heroic cock.

Is it security you seek? Daily sessions of unconditional affirmation? Like congealed animal fat the weight of your uncertainties hangs in pockets of condensed self-pity, you roam the earth a victim of the hurt you have been prescribed by the crooked sources of power in your sick society: you believe them though all they have done is reduced you to another consumer casualty waiting to wear an American flag around the grave;  in death you’ll be as valued as the cost of your tomb. Until then, I hate the way your lips coil around the words of your favorite pop-star icon.

I know you fight it, you’re wrapped in your own skin shaking like a dying dog, a look of anger drips wet with worry and is smeared across the canvas of your nighttime portrayal. It is pain to descend into darkness, to release the demons you have all day concealed with a half-ass smile and neon bright words that defend your make-believe bliss. For you life is a thin dress of sugar which coats a swollen seed of malcontent.

What would you need to release the beast? How long until you give birth to your morbid offspring; a word or a glance or a thought or a sentence that spews like vomit from your soured insides? You deliver unto the world that with which it has you impregnated; coils of hurt, anger, hatred, and grief. Your life is a permanent gestation of a broken fetus with a broken heart; your child wears the crown of thorns long before it’s born, she is doomed to carry the burden of a thousand stubborn mistakes; thank you, mother murderer.

So what now? You’ll sleep eventually, wearing the pink frames or cuddling them close to the scabs on the knuckles of your graying hands, awaking to feed your aging addictions, one by one they surface and you place them in line, one after another, each one fulfilled only brings you closer to the next; you cherish your alcoholic itinerary and so long as you’re awake you function like a machine driven by a programmed response that has you constantly inputting random data and outputting arbitrary waste, the sad cycle of someone convinced they are deprived and only partially a person.

So you learn of things which only jumble spiritual reception and from it you produce no good action except the action to deny that divinity exists outside of dreams. You are alone, you prefer to be alone, so no one can ever get close enough to learn why it is that you wear your glasses to bed… but I know, I watch you as you sleep…