Gambling

Livewell 2017 Rt. 228

There is a price to be paid for silence. Traveling far to unknown spaces to find it, then finding the arena to be too small. Women moan behind closed curtains, tattered, flapping in the sparse wind. There is a price to be paid for looking, an encapsulated reference to your dreams and aspirations. What will you see and how will it contribute to your being? Satisfaction, that hard won mistress beckons at uncharted openings. Often, you cannot come in since you do not have the price for a seat with those who do not know that suffering from hunger is more painful than detoxing from heroin. You find unconscionable doctors have convinced a legion of women from low to high, that Xanax is the answer. There is camaraderie in pain, the great equalizer. You are dumbfounded by the lack of investigation, the denial, the waving away of potentially disfiguring substitutes for a life. What do we want, us women, whose history is plagued with bondage? Hysterical, the research has said for decades, as cuff marks line our ankles and wrists. We begin to see them as bracelets fearing each other on the socio-economic level. Fearing each other in the presence of men. Distance is my only answer to the debate.

Screaming. I hear screaming no matter where I go. Either muffled in the hallowed halls of marble and linen or down the alley, where garbage flies fight with dogs for food. All this screaming. I can hardly bare it. You never wind up in the house of silence in the American desert, or far away from the tourist traps in the Himalayas. I do not know why this is. Escaping to the mountains only to hear the traffic on the highway below or some grass cutter with a seat of a Saturday afternoon. You are stunned by such things. The need for noise constricts your lungs, squeezes your heart. You grow tired of the search, renewed only by desperation. In the end, despite all, you find money is the only thing you’re lacking, or so it seems. Many a platitude is deserted on the grounds that a new level is reached and the answer becomes unclear. What do we know? It seems so vague at the finish line.

The air is full of burning rubber, plastic and shrilly honking horns. Magic lies underneath. It gets lost in daily activities with countless truisms. Help me from what I want as the wanter gets everything, luck running side by side her pronouncements. Maybe it is a pleasanter personality. The glossing over to make palpable. The lies prove thin as observation dictates another answer in the quest for a spot in the world. The pickaxe grows weary today. Your glasses are scratched. You want to see, to be heard. The sickness leaves you weak. A good word or image bolsters the loins. You begin again with another reviving narrative. We are stories, all stories we tell ourselves that shift from person to person, moment to moment. Without them there would be no stage to play on, no life to be lead.