Adriana.K.Maxwell
The nurse is quick with the needle. That's a blessing. She keeps on talking as she caps the sample, keeping my thoughts from being able to focus on the next upcoming stab. It doesn't hurt that much, I know, it's only in my mind. I've done this before and it is never as bad as I am expecting. Still, I breathe slow and look away.
Doctor, doctor, what's wrong with me? Because I don't know what normal is. Is this important? Or this? Does this actually hurt or am I just being a baby?
The police car creeps in the bush, silent white, before bursting out in red and blue and color. I saw a police car in China, still and silent but the lights were flashing. I asked what was wrong and my hosts were worried. "Nothing," they said, "he's probably just taking a break. Maybe eating his supper" and what a dangerous country I must live in to worry about such things. But colors have always meant "pay attention" to me. How hard it is to know a country by its headlines!
Sailing among stars, no monsters, only silence and a hungry dark, floating with no currents, naming rocks
Inventor-daydreaming in blueprints, in wheels and gears and math equations, balancing things out, force, friction, and tension, bringing a hammer to fix up the future
The scientist is white coat and details printed clearly in lines and columns and spreadsheets. If at first, it succeeds, try, try again about 30,000 more times, just to be sure.
Sneak through, fake passports, fake names, never personal, always watching, always listening
Soldier, keep on treading on, you can get used to anything, even tragedy, dead is dead, and that's what happens, you can sleep next to bombs and screaming, tomorrow is hazy, a maybe sort of thing like riding into the sunset at happily ever after, it is only today, only now that matters, there is no time for funerals, no time to mourn, only load your gun so you're not next, you can get used to anything, you think, except it's waiting for you in the cobwebs of the storage unit with your soccer net and your dalmatian sheets from when you were a boy carrying sticks and your "dead" brother rose from the lawn, grass still in his hair, when your mother called you in for mac and cheese
Stand in the arena, hear the crowds roar, know your life depends on their thumbs up, it is not enough to win, you need to be showy, get them calling your name, women perfuming themselves with your sweat
Viking, fur cloak and salt-toughened skin, looking to the horizon, eyes sharp, looking for treasure, looking for violence, looking for glory, Valhalla can never rest in peace
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