and so I'm offering this simple phrase:

[ollay1391]

Please don’t mock me for my faults. They’re all I have.

This is what happens to children to forget to floss.
This is what I have come to.
I am sitting, half-covered by scummy water
In a bathtub, installed circa
1973. Nixon years. Then Regan years.
It’s a beige yellow, Jacuzzi heads, mildewed.
The tiles are green.
This is all of me, my person, my creative
Endeavors

And the slanted, quivering needle of my moral compass

Laying in the murky water, in this world of mine.

I do not fit completely.
I look like a frog, ready for dissection,
Naked, belly up, legs pinned down,
I am ready to be opened now, please.

Gentlemen, gentlemen,
You are a firing squad. Your eyes are cloudy,
Bloodshot.
Are you high?
(Shoot blindly. Aim low.)

I am here, pressing my arms against my body just to keep myself in
In fear that I may leak too much of myself
out of my armpits,
And later will have to be hoovered
From the carpet,
With a fan set up
To relieve the stubborn last few

tears that I can cry now, in this water,
Of my person, in this tub, this ugly tub
this ugly body this ugly frog, dead.

Dead, ready to be something else.

Turn me inside out.