Ignorance of a Side
I.
I love you, I tell you
But you couldn’t tell before?
My heart pummeled each sense;
My affection was confessed.
What other signs need be made;
Was I not myself desire?
Am I not endearing in need—
In need
Of you?
I’ll abstain but I’ll remain further
Until you say:
“You, you loved me?”
II.
In case you never did, do it now
You’ll live the regrets on the way home
And I won’t be there.
I like that you are polite, but a question hurts little
A question is but a question
But you don’t, delicately, ask.
Your cowardice draws you near
Nearer and dearer
Perhaps skip the question then
Before we part.
Clever Pandora
Bleak in a beaker, corked and screwed
Give me the Bunsen burner, let us torch this bitch
Boyle’s Law: under pressure, we expand
Feel the humdrum all around, see the shards splayed out bleak
In a beaker blasted broken
I am cleverer Pandora to eradicate the evil
Swim, live breathe it nonchalant
And you, Man, gasp as at fault mine, an infamy
Trace my limbs in the miasma while I yet last
At last rid, of the bleak and the mires lonely
Candids
I read the glossy, or
at least I read the headline
“So-and-So You-Wouldn’t-Believe”
could’ve been Queen Elizabeth
but how should I recall?
There are so, so many names that get plastered on the wall.
The glossy’s pictures are what I come for
schaudenfreude and envy are nothing to me
Validate JFK or Celine Dion
not anymore—I want the wrong side of Cher’s face
unblissful Michael Jackson
saints don’t have to be holy,
just inhuman
Popular forever, maybe pitiable
St. Sebastian’s votive flickers at an altar
Kept alight all night
Not because I love him, this homotextual arrow-pierced martyr
a lonesome moth needs in the night a light
to aspire toward Heaven
impressions opine sanctity
Blanche and I
Les petites morts, they aren’t so hard
But, she says, the dying is a sin to behold
It breaks you
It makes you
In classes they theorize about it, but Blanche and I
Go to the Pink Flamingo
we ditch classes for the boys
we are rhinestones, and want the truth velvet
we wrap ourselves in curtains
we remember the BANG like it sounded
Blanche and I are magic, foundation and lipstick
And in the end, there is always the kindness of strangers.
Take me away she says
Take me away from myself,
But Blanche I say, you won’t be taken alive
Velvet woods aren’t welcome!
They’ll scribble new names for us that grind your favorite students’ chalkboards
Sanitarium. Sanitize.
Not magic, realism, a waiting predators’ bedlam.
POP
Perfectly pretty people
Overcome by the influence of what’s it
Pictured in the cinema, silver, technicolor, visible.
The streamline set of the stage:
What’s-her-name, she waltzes right in out of the elevator
with A cold slim pistol
One discharge
Marilyn stacked on Marilyn Monroe, a stack of Marilyn Monroe, bleeds no blood
And Andy thinks, that’s business for you
his “Shot Marilyn” sells like naughty piercing
Indulgence for the same men in hard silk boxers
The first superstar, Girl of the Year
Deranged, already dead in mink
Sing “Like A Rolling Stone,” Bob Dylan
Where perfect pretty people end up at the end of the reel
Bad Music (for Lenore)
Thought you were safe, didn’t you
Til pop came to you.
Hymnal was the night
‘Til the pop came to you
The angels’ wings cried sooted feathers
The strings broke a synthesized jag
Slicing immortality the moment
The moment Lenore threw on the bed
Evermore memory Rolling Stone
The rock winded a bubble
Once pop came to you.
She old Lenore heaved a blue sigh
She Lenore scatted her grave
She rapped on Heaven’s Gate
Turned to gyrate an enflamed electro
You needed her didn’t you
‘Til the pop came to you.
Unhurried Tortoise
The stoplight will change again
I’m not expectant of reward where I go
In a moment I’ll rebegin
I savor what green grows
There are many lights to change yet
How many, I’ll let you know
There is always a binary, two extremes. The truth is somewhere between.
MEDEA don’t kill your children,
Just
Dreg your ashes on the floor
Sane or distract? Real or mythic? I’m somewhere betwixt these concepts.
In kneading the wind, I finally find my sanity. My psychotherapist could never have dreamed my truth so weird; in her counseling upon the binary, neither could I—though, in retrospect, discovering my own witchy gender identity could not have been buried so deep beneath my delusion. I am privileged this way: as a bipolar schizoaffective I indulge intoxicated by flights from reality, delusion. Coming into my own, I soar upon delusion into truth, the maw of reality. Often, the wind obeys my summons, and I believe. Often, it does not, and I trust truth, that firm control is but another phallocentric delusion.
I have been calling upon the wind to change since I was 21, when I dropped out of Grinnell College amid the tremors of psychotic fallout. The wind has finally lifted. When I submitted to Madwomen in the Attic some months ago, I was still moored in masculinity—male, but not “man.” Since, I have negotiated extremity… self-medication via marijuana, manic decisions beckoning ultimately constructive cognitive dissonance, conversation with my dear therapist heeded in the practice and abandoned summarily. I trust mediation and medication, but I am a weird, an alchemist, a barista and mixologist of kismet.
Advice is empowerment, but self-actualization is a trump suit to –realization. There is no certain recipe for the former, and there is little mutual exclusivity between the two. I am grateful for my support network (a clinical term), but it is the mad mistakes that I have made myself from which I have learned. It is the mad triumphs with which I identify. Madness is the better route for us; illness connotes negatively, it is contracted. But our character is reclamation from more mires than we know, beyond patriarchy and clinicism, not merely historic. Our battles begin within ourselves.
My distant ancestor George Gordon, Lord Byron, was an incestuous queer wildman: epithetically, “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” We are the artists of our time too, painted mad, Jacksonianly bad, and, yes, dangerous to know. Moreover, we are dangerous to love. I am not a complete character. Neither are you. But the truth is, we are safe to know love, that dangerous beast, and just as dangerous as our mounting self-knowledge. Dispense with sanitized cliché, your madness is your very own.
That is magic.
Medea Sinsation is a dabbler, a dilettante, and a devil. Medea would be another witch, Medea another comedian. But the Medea before you, assembles assemblage, Tarot, verse, and debatably prose. At 26, she lives in 29 Palms, CA, USA, where she can occasionally be found reading for post-grunge band OURS PAST.
As Giovanni Garcia, she has published locally with Cholla Needles Magazine Space Cowboy Books (The Inflatable Catechism, 2016); nonlocally, The Platform Review.
Madwomen in the Attic 
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