A Lice

When I stare at my miserly body mirrored in the intimate imitation of the hours of yesterday, I ache to step outside the limitations of its guilt-edged frame.

I want to go beyond the sensation of the scared child glaring blackly back, to shut-down its tirade of tyrannical thoughts and openly become a ferocious cloud, a mighty waterfall or a cyclical happening of ceaseless breaths.

I have prodded and pushed myself into many inappropriate positions. I have tried to face-up to the lies of the loaded dice and I have eaten the earthly flesh from both sides of the nonsense-mushroom; only to gag on its bitterness.

Wonderland was the world I was told to long for; the place where anything could happen, the place where I could grow a new head.

Instead I have become my own infatuation, my own torturer and my own mean-minded master. I wear weird costumes and queer masks, I perform bizarre tasks. I invent fabulous horrors for myself and I disobey my commands. There are no rules here. I drop like sand through my own fingers; I am an esoteric storyteller.

And I am the heroine, hurled into outrageous adventures, swirling anticlockwise through corridors of locked doors.

I tease myself with out-of-reach keys and ingest drugs that make me shrink, then swell me to enormous proportions. I cry tears big enough to drown in and float along in this plot like an upturned boat.

Occasionally I get stranded on a strange island, where cats and mice play cat-and-mouse games with me and scare away the imaginary birds.

Some days, dressed as a white rabbit, I magically return to the beginning, to chastise my make-believe other and taunt my invented self with a hypnotic watch that ticks backwards.