Masks can't remember why you're crying

I'm forty-eight

In flash memory

Hardly ever accurate

Forty-nine in real time

Though

Nearly fifty

Coming up too soon

Thirteen

Trying to stay the child I used to be

Fighting the loss of that life and the ways I wished it could be

I remember being alone

I had dogs

And cats

And a lot of dreams fueled by books and movies

And games

And teachers telling me how good I am at so many things

And I was really good at being alone

I was really good at being alone

But they didn't give out smelly stickers for that

Nor shiny gold stars

Didn't clap me on the back and say

Good for you!

With an A-plus-plus in the upper corner of a sheet

Testing what I knew about talking to myself in my room

Because no one else was there except the ghosts I had to dream

And all those adult voices getting stuck in my head

Telling me how great I was

And how far I'd go

And look at me now!

T-shirt and underwear writing on a years-old gifted computer

Hating washing dishes so I'm eating off of paper plate

And drinking coffee black because after forty years I finally realized

I like it that way

I actually like it that way

Not the same for the emptiness

Not the same for the solitude

My cat walks in and out of the room

Sometimes looking for attention

Sometimes looking for food

Every time breaking my stride

And I have to start over

I was told I could write

But look at me now!

Where are my books?

The ones everyone said companies would be sucking my dick to publish?

Oh, there they are

Decomposing in the corner with every other lie

Like hemorrhoids on an ass bleeding raw and dry

Like memories and smiles more than forty god damned years old

Sometime before I turned thirteen

I don't remember if anything happened then

It's just when I think things started to change

And I started seeing the outlines and mistakes in my cartoon time

The lips moving on the dummy on the *STM club

Not the lady

The guy before

I don't remember his name

Just Central NY TV shit

I wasn't old

We were still mostly little

I think my sister got his autograph

I won't try to ask her though

She's not someone I need to know

My grandparents are dead

No one tried to tell me

My real ones

Not the replacement who thought I was her son

They died around my birthday

Before and after

A month apart last year

I didn't know

It hurt to find out on my own

Seeing their obituaries come up on the screen so recently

Still hurts

Fills me with pain

And rage

And my eyes want to cry but I'm holding that shit in

I hope to flood the world with it when I finally die

There are people you think will be around forever

Long enough to talk to again

I'm betting my mother will be next

Not the one I remember

The one that is today

I don't know her at all

Except for a seconds-long talk on my grandparents phone years ago

During Christmas dinner

That I wasn't prepared for

Wasn't ready to have

Didn't want at the time

How do you let someone just take your child?

And raise them as their own?

Rape

Oh

yeah

I hadn't forgot

Nobody wants the rape kid

The rape kid a few rungs short of a tree house

The rape kid with emotional issues

The undiagnosed autistic one no one knows was born that way

I don't think I got it from him

Must have got the alone from him

Though

And everyone else

But she will die

The one I don't know

And if she goes before me I will cry

Because the one I don't know could have been the one I do

If this world had any good

I used to be good at things like this

I was told

At handling the big things that came up

No one knew how I was handling Martha dying so well

And didn't seem to mind living with the abusers

Masks were easy to make

I didn't have to be good at those

Just good enough

It helps when you're never hit on the outside

Masks can't remember why you're crying again

* The STM Club was a local children’s show in the 1980s that aired as afterschool entertainment in central New York. Each episode showed usually two, but sometimes more, usually unrelated cartoons per episode. It was hosted by a handful of local television station staff that worked at the time for channel WSTM (Channel 3, out of Syracuse, NY) who played live action characters; as well as by two separate ventriloquists at different times in the show’s history, Dennis Bowman (originally), and Beth Sutton (until live hosts were phased out in favor of just showing cartoons).

** This is from a collection of poems I have been writing throughout the month of May, 2025, and may not reflect the day in May that it was written on.