At breakfast, you tell me the world cannot be held with words—it must be shaped like a cave painting that accepts its life as a slice of the whole. Words are ambitious, you say, they imagine they can contain whatever I yearn to contain. Words are a beautiful bit in the teeth, you say, gold-studded reins, tugging my gentle mouth wherever they say we should go. You don’t have to tell me that words are a kind of superego to my artist Id. My cave painter. She wants to splash and get dirty. The superego files her nails and fills in her patchy eyebrows. My green shoes are splattered with pink paint. I hate pink. I want a black and white world marching across the page in single file like army ants. I want pink paint under my nails. I want to paint naked women with pink wings. I am a menace to myself. I am a savior. Every oxymoron lives inside me. I am a war zone. I am a field after fire, where the wildflowers come back first, then the aspens, then the pine.
Photo by Wilhelm Gunkel on Unsplash
