Quasimodo - When He Was A Centerfold Poem by Jesse Ellsbury

Quasimodo – When He Was A Centerfold
Jesse Ellsbury
I write you now, beloved, from the brink. After the loss of all else, I’m trying to salvage myself. Feeding on remorse. It’s a hard truth, a hard line, a hard lie to accept, and self-blame is more severe than any power could impose. That statement made with swallowed knowledge of the desperation that was sand in a desert with monoliths of steel. Seven hours languishing in that dehydrated swamp, my company in good times being ghosts of former citizens. In the bad times, my toxic guilt. I keep trying to tell myself that I will pull through. I don’t believe me. Others tell me I’ll be okay, but their perceptions are voyeur visions, while my emotions are a language no one speaks. They don’t know the horrors lunging in my mind: phantoms of lost opportunities, a good soul imprisoned in a bad body. Dorian Gray had it made.

My name is Quasimodo. I was a centerfold before the weight of the world made my head a goiter. My ambitions swerve drunken through abandoned synapses, hopped up on dopamine and serotonin – until they’re outlawed. If they could handcuff the sun, it would’ve been done, ghouls litigating into the night. I spend days in alleys; crouched beneath accusations that swarm above me like buzzards. I’ve faced their kind. I know their vulture type: wrinkled necks like discarded foreskins, toothless beaks – bitter minds reminiscing on dinosaur days when they had teeth. Life is a struggle ‘tween old and young. They want me to switch sides, Huttling [sic] in shadows of cheap, balding, MacDonald’s dumpsters – trying to make me swallow tainted carrion traditions.

I have evolved. I was new when I was born. I’m trying to believe I’m not old. My body believes this lie; my mind doubts this truth. I try to convince myself, in the jungle of my mind, that ferns of resolve outlast trees of self-doubt. My saving grace is death; my saving grace is that I’m not dead. I see clearly things unclear, and refuse to make concrete determinations ‘til the concrete hardens. The horizon is a Tupperware seal on a world that seeks to spoil me. I’m just not sure how that word is used. Or what the world seeks to spoil me with: mold or icing?

I am fortunate to have the loved ones I do. I convert their love into disappointment. The past laughs; onlookers mistake me for a liability. Surrogate Dreams divorced Reality, who wept crimson ambitions, while Hope, the orphan of Anonymous A and Anonymie B, bleeds tears. I’m surrounded by suppositions, spiritual incisions of reckless consequence…consequence of recklessness. There is a value discrepancy flooding our relationship like blood out of bodies, filling the space between us with life – I must establish equilibrium to save them from their foolish faith in a fallen being. No one tried to pull Satan up when he fell, I became servant, not king, upon my demise.

I am Resilience. I will survive. I refuse to cry when I live, refuse to live when I die. It is the farthest fall I’ve survived. I try to tell myself there’s a reason I’m alive – but nothing can redeem why I fell. I swim in obituaries. Of course, that is my myopic vantage point, seeing through a glass darkly. I’m waiting to find out if the glass has the integrity to stand all I’ve piled on it. The hurdle is not life, it’s livelihood. I know it, but I’m standing on legs cut in half, using femurs as canes – ‘til someone comes and beats me with them again. Legs broken by my legs.

I’ve heard platitudes and attitudes; I’m trying to decipher fact from fiction, dreams from nightmares, but the two switch place so often I can’t keep track. They trade places on Wednesdays – cocaine lawns and two-hour delays. The hardest thing now is to maintain my self-worth in a black hole. I shouldn’t subject myself to the views of others, but how do I not when those views determine my fate? It’s a fictitious reality – realistic fiction – that runs counter to object relations, while it’s the views of the hungry desperate malicious militias of minutiae minds that keep me animal-cracked, animal-caged, animal-crazed, and cannibalized.