Parallel

1. 
In the Parallel, at the train yard, I breathe.
We cough up coal dust and dirt, coat our hands in it,
it is our sandbox with its broken beer bottles someone forgot some Saturday night.
The last Saturday we can remember Jimmy and Lucy got drunk,
got lost, stayed lost in each other all night,
in the woods, with the leaves, a reverse Adam and Eve,
come see me naked here, I am flesh here.
The sun rose, God was angry, took them aside and lectured them,
Lucy still had the apple in her mouth and was thus fired.
Jimmy went back to work and claims not to remember anything.

2.
I hold your heart and all you can do is beg me not to squeeze.
I wonder, How do you like it?  Me with the power and you helpless and dependent and
            twitching.
I don’t write about love because of some secret romance,
I write about love because I’m trying to explain it.
I invent you in your softloud manner with your smoothcalloused hands.
Your hair and eyes change color,
but it doesn’t matter because I love you and you love me and aren’t we adorable in our
            quiet invisible ways?
We are a fairy tale in which I refuse to be the damsel in distress,
but you can be distressed so long as you do so in a stubborn, masculine sort of way.
I want to save you, why do we always want to save someone,
why do I think people should need saving?
There’s something unsatisfactory about satisfaction, isn’t there?
If you could live without emotional pain, would you do it?
Stop.  Think about it.  Forget the flowers and the candy.
Without our pasts we’d rather forget, what are we worth?  How do we grow?
In the Parallel, we’re all happy,
we’re all a bunch of robots and smiling and we all hate ourselves for reasons we don’t 
            understand.
But we’re happy about it, you know, because in the Parallel everyone’s happy but doesn’t
            know it.
There’s never been anything else.
This is not teenage angst, this is not me weeping in a corner every night because the
            world hates me because the world doesn’t hate me.
This is me and you and the facts of the matter.

3.
In the Parallel I move to the City to make it big, but who hasn’t?
I’m tending a bar when a man tells me I have beautiful legscheekboneseyes,
(I don’t remember and it doesn’t matter) and he’d love to paintkisspaint them sometime.
It’s an old line and I know it, so I tell him I’m a model and he can pay me for my body if
            he wants to.
The double meaning isn’t lost, it’s never lost, and he eventually decides my legs aren’t made for painting,
but are made for being wrapped around him,
and we’re both breathing loudly because we think we’re supposed to,
but I don’t really mean it.  I can’t speak for him.

4.
Blood has two parts.  It’s the plasma that makes it all go, in its insignificant yellow
            packaging.
Red gets all the credit, with its stain power, its potency, its poetic consequences.
In the Parallel the blood keeps flowing and no one ever dies,
but people talk of overpopulation and resources running out and not much has changed.
If no one could die would we see the end of war?
Or would war become a purely psychological engagement,
Let’s see how much stuff I can set on fire before you turn in for the night?
In the Parallel we all start to bleed lemonade without the profits of the stand.
The sun tries to kill us and we shrivel up, but cannot die.
This universe must have come from the universe of happy robots.
They’re related – distant cousins, call each other on the weekends but never get through.
Cross-dimensional communication is such a bitch these days.
Newton said that every action has an equal and opposite reaction,
Einstein said something more complicated and called it quantum mechanics, but both 
            were right.

5.
People disappear so often it’s like breathing.
The respirator system is controlled by the hypothalamus, which controls all the
involuntary things –
breathing, blinking, body temperature.  I learned that in school.
My mother tells me how the coca is going to burn us all alive.
She says this only when the high is wearing off and she’s sitting quietly in the kitchen
            trying to exist.
She says that if the Americans don’t destroy us first then the drug lords will.
Which is worse, hijo, which is worse?
Death by the end of a pistol or the end of a needle, which is worse?
My mothers tells me she loves me, if I ever try this shit she’ll kill me,
and slides off the couch and onto the floor.
In the parallel we choke on our blood and inhale dirt, but, like always,
we don’t know any better and we accept it.

6.
In the Parallel I can’t stop smiling.  The sun shines in our eyes and we laugh with it.
My best friend and I bury ourselves in sand until only our heads are showing,
lying on piles of sand that are now our pillows.
It’s warm but it’s always warm but we use the sand as a blanket anyway.
We sleep to awaken when the wind blows,
the temperature has dropped and we need real blankets, or at least sweaters.
Our days are like summer dreams in fall.

7.
Meet me.  I live in the Parallel.  I will have 2.5 kids if I don’t already,
have a picket fence if I don’t already, die if I haven’t already.
Here I am, the living breathing soul of myself.
Which of us is real?  You can’t help but ask the question.
Even I can’t help but ask the question and I’m the one of us with the essential problem of
           existence.
A is a creation of B is a creation of A.  All these circle would make anyone dizzy.
I try to count all the incarnations, dream up a million versions of my life and forget
            others.
I feel small.

2007 Elyssa Feder