The weather is supposed to warm up, so I want to get this out – the visions of bleeding out, sticky, tacky, freezing to the icy concrete. I imagine my foot instantly freezing to the ground and when I move, my leg breaking off at the ankle. Falling over the stump, over my own sock and shoe, the blood working as an adhesive to glue me dead to the sidewalk.
I have disgusting thoughts all the time. I’ve tried to figure out why. The best answer I can come up with is fear – there’s a rush from the fear of the thought. It’s adrenaline. Adrenaline from fear of the imagined event, and fear of myself for thinking these thoughts. Sicko. Throughout my 20’s I was obsessed with the idea that I would enter some sort of waking dream, and when revived, I’d look down at the bloody stub where my thumb used to be, with the missing digit in my mouth. In junior high I went to bed thinking of someone cutting my feet with a knife long-ways as I slept. (I think this was heavily influenced by the Nightmare on Elm Street movies.)
In the past year these grotesque thoughts started to morph into ideas of biting my daughter. My teeth would ache and need the pressure of a bite to relieve them. Of course this idea scared the shit out of me, but like any good horror, the more I tried to suppress the thoughts, the more prevalent they became. I started not to trust myself around her. Her skin was just too soft, softer than a flour tortilla. So finally I told myself to go fuck myself and my dumb idea – “if you really want to bite something so badly, go bite yourself,” I said in my head. I told my daughter I had to go to the bathroom, lifted her off my lap to the open couch cushion besides me. In the bathroom I locked the door and put my hand in my mouth. I sheepishly bit down. Not hard at all. “Wimp,” I thought. “Do it harder. BITE.” I went to do it again, but it was just too stupid. I removed my hand from my mouth, wiped off the spit with a bit of toilet paper, and stopped thinking about biting my daughter.
I’m wrestling with the idea to post poems I know I’m not going to use for any other purpose here. Poems that don’t make a lot of sense or ones that are unpolished and coarse. Is posting poems on the Internet really more fearsome than taking a bloody chunk out of your daughter with your teeth?