I Set Myself on Fire

blue jeans

Because of the Epstein Files, I set myself on fire.

It's okay to kink shame some people. Some of them want to serve their sausage on a biscuit. Some of these fuckers are against the law, it's not fair. Doesn't it just boil your broth! This is 51.

This is a portrait of a character who wears blue jeans.

On the other end, there's a clumsy creature coated in gravel dust, crawling up steps to a turd green porch screen door with lead paint peeling. Sky Mediterranean blue, hard iron sulfur water spigot. Around a goldfish pond, unwashed kids tormenting love bugs, lips powder-yellow with pollen, slathered in Bahiagrass seed. The bed of an umber Ford rusts through and green is bursting bright.

Things you think of when there's no time.

My heart buzzed and bristled and once fell into a hole I filled with her face. We've all been someone who wanted someone who didn't want us. Haven't you? That hurt of a reaching out and never feeling a hand in the darkness to pull us up. What we thought would make us whole never learned our name.

I hid under the daybed on the dirty tile with no clothes watching a mother and a father kick each other when the dishes smashed to the ground sent shards skating across the floor at my face, arriving with the sound at the very same time. Tile is cool and good on a naked boy belly, a beach of grains of sand on the floor make a scratching sound, when an opportunistic black worm crawled up me and made itself at home. In ways I never came out from under, still hiding, dingy with curled long hair and ashen.

Remember Shogun Warriors?

Not much means much.

That was fast, didn't know it wouldn't last. Open your gaze to the window, a gold cross in your eye, an angel like me runs naked in the round in its long white and yellow tattered sleeping gown, trailing flaming footsteps. You can go now. I don't know what I wanted you to believe. I don't know what I wanted to convince you of.

---

Neil Oldman for the Daydream Misfit blog

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