By Maya Lerma
Isolation is a funny word
in it there is an unreachable other
and the airy dry despair
of loneliness
…
I have removed the sheets from my bed
I’d say it’s so the bedbugs can keep me company
but it’s because my arms are too weak to lift the mattress
and my will is too weak toil at what does not come easy
what is humanity if not branding cowardice as victory
and this is cowardice
so i lay on my sheetless bed
and feel like a loser
if there was a bomb in my mattress
(planted by my cat, no doubt)
I would make like the princess and the pea
(very scary pea)
and sleep on it
sleep is the greatest solace for a coward
not much to worry about then
besides staining your sheetless bed
with loser-ooze, or something
I am too much a coward to try too much at anything
it is much too easy to lose
when you do not try
the bomb in my mattress
ticks away in a rhythm
that feels like mockery
the bomb might be in me, I think
(does that make me the princess or the pea)
and my sheets are no doubt thanking me for sparing them
how nice to have helped someone, for once
the bomb is urgency
it is every fiber of my flesh frenetic
and on fire
it is trying to light me on fire, probably
nobody is a coward when they’re on fire
halfway to ash and seconds from hell
I’m sure even I could be brave then
It keeps ticking
so it must be a time bomb
and I am surely the worst time-waster
it has ever met
If the world ended
I think I would be relieved
or so I say to my sheetless bed
It does not respond and
I wonder if it needs the sheets for that
and if by removing them I have taken its soul
if I have wrenched from it every ounce of personality
just to save myself the work
If the world ended
I hope somebody would come and put its sheets back on
If the world ended
I think I would be relieved
to die
to leave my legacy in the sheetless, bomb-laden mattress
stained irrevocably with my remnants
painted with my cowardice
and molded to my spinelessness
a cruel fate
If the world ended
I hope somebody would come and put a sheet on me.
…
Isolation is a funny word
but when I am the unreachable other
and the airy dry
and the loneliness
It doesn’t feel quite so funny anymore