I’ve always been good at hiding. 
I hid in closets, under tables, in crawl spaces. 
Sometimes I was too good at hiding, I hid under a pile of laundry, planning to ambush my mom, but it took too long and I fell asleep. 
I woke up and my parents were on the phone reporting me missing.
And it’s not just me, I am also good at hiding THINGS.
Like, money, or my feelings, 
I’ve been hiding my feelings as long as I can remember. 
I have to.
Feelings left out in the open will almost always fuck me over. 
Someone’ll come along and beat me with one of my own feelings like it was a pipe wrench.
Sometimes I’ll put on an old jacket and find hundreds of dollars I hid in the pocket years ago. 
Sometimes, in the middle of the night I’ll be thinking about something long ago and open a box of some fucked up feelings I forgot I buried there. 
Then I’m screwed for hours of wide awake anger or pain. 
It doesn’t matter that there’s good stuff buried in with or under the bad shit. 
I mean, it doesn’t matter how thrilled I was when my dad gave me the guitar, or how much I loved the lessons, and playing for my class at school. All I get is the loss and dismay when he showed up and said he needed HIS guitar back. So all of it, the hours tuning, carrying, cleaning, and playing that guitar all went into the same box and got buried just deep enough to float to the surface when I least expect it.
All those fucking boxes, 
packed with stuffed monkeys, tragic birthdays, public humiliation, dogs hit by cars, deceitful people, dead friendships, and dead friends. 
They become unmarked metal jack in the box tins, and, like an idiot, I lay awake at night and crank those fucking handles.
There’s never any money hidden in those things. 
The money is always harder to find because I leave it places I think nobody would think to look. 
I’m fooled by my own logic because I’m just putting it in places I would never think to look.
I’m only hiding it from myself.


I think I might be hiding from myself. 
That’s a weird one, and I don’t like to spend time cranking the handle on that. 
I mean, I know exactly where I’m hiding. I saw myself go in there. 
I’m in the cupboard. 
When I tap on the door, I don’t answer. Even though I know it’s me out there tapping. 
I don’t answer, for the same reason I don’t just open the door. 
I don’t trust myself. 
One of me will say or do something painful or stupid, 
and another part of me that hides someplace I am not yet aware of will hear or see, 
and all the fucking unmarked jack in the boxes’ll fly open at once, 
and it’ll take me weeks of haunted night wrestling to get them all buried again 
and people’ll look at me and say things like , “you seem distant, what’s up?”
And my mind, 
knee deep in celluloid film still falling off the reels will say, 
“Nothing, I just had a thought, but it’s gone now”
​

​Just graduated! From ankle-biter to gabbler, still a magnet for every passing female to scour my face-drool with dank and musty cloths they never sniff first, and damn! I don’t know mom’s gartered knees from the grammas’ when they charge me. I don’t know shit (well, literally, sure) I don’t know pigs can’t fly!  But everything sizzling on my retinas and trampolining on the drums of both ears sparks high-voltage straight into my sponge-brain—ZOT! I gobble it all! From pupa to pupil! In no-sense (innocence!), a state of grace, I got no filters, gullible, but that’s great ‘cause I’ll be a pain in the tuchus ‘til I get me some sense and grownups dish it it out by the bushel and they can’t keep from ogling the calendar for the red-letter day I’ll be worth talking to and I slurp it all up and squeal gimme summore!
But there’s a worm wriggling in this apple pie, a guided missile with crosshairs on my forehead and it’s called dogma. With luck when I get lanky and cheeky I’ll call it dreck and vomit it out, but bits of the vile grossness cling and I’ll beg the cosmos for a very high colonic to cleanse my greymatter and kill the sick twin-joke of gospel and gossip, flush ‘em down the cloaca with kindred sewage. The fam-damily guts their most cherished, and there’s no Me Too! for victims of clot-brains so while belief in the power of prayer still has me hijacked I’ll pray those so-called grownups suffer epiphany someday, gripped by the horror of their gruesome villainy, except I wouldn’t really wish that on the worst.
I’m my own biggest fool, and post-cheeky me, analytical me, kicks crazy in the tires, ‘cause transubstantiation just screams cool, and critical faculties go eyeball to eyeball with the gnostic Gods and what was I thinking! to forget that since great-grandpappy crawled from the brine on stubby fins, every single craziness that has ever been grokked has turned out to be not magic!
And cut to this dismal day when I’m the official geezer and fuck! would I grin to talk smarts into the new blood but their ears are stuffed with Spotify and you’re not the boss of me! is the respect I get for trying to save them! Save them from barking fools. Barricade those brains from becoming kith and kin to nitwits and grist for cocktease hucksters. I’d piss on a spark plug to future-proof Gen-whatthefuck but they’ve never seen War Games and they refuse me and now my damn coffee’s gone cold.