Cages
I’m tired of being a character,
a fool, a jester, a scapegoat,
the girl everyone loves to laugh with
until she knocks her unopened twenty-four ounce Heineken
off the dining room table
and the voices start in on her
again.
Shards of green glass intermingle
with the foamy liquid spreading across the tile floor
and the girl, the only one cut by the glass
can only hear yelling and screaming:
Aaron berating her being there – no,
for existing in the first place;
Patrick rushing her to leave
without her cigarettes, beer, cell phones, keys, CDs,
and then, of course, there are
the screech owls, the howler monkeys, the ‘gulls, and the hyenas
acting up in their cages
in her mind.
They rattle the metal bars
begging to be fed some bit of
violence, and the girl wants so bad
to lash out, to hit blindly, without caring
if she actually lands a punch.
Instead, she ignores her caged and often cruel pets,
tries her best to make nice with everyone,
even rushing out so fast she leaves her mama’s cell phone behind.
Her best friend promises to bring it to her the next day.
She just hopes she can count on something,
but the sounds of those incessant caged animals,
trapped in her head, longing
to get out –
poor fools,
they don’t even know she’s
more trapped than they are.
So she goes home,
tapes her hands, puts her hair up,
takes off her earrings and oh-so-expensive trendy poncho,
switches shoes, washes the tear-stained face no one
was privileged enough to see.
She puts some Janis on the stereo,
“Another little piece of my heart now . . .”
and all that jazz.
She sends her punching bag to the ICU
and rages privately
in a wood-paneled, book-lined cage.
But a hint of a smile creeps into her face
at the satisfaction that no one,
not even her pets,
will ever know what these moments were like for her.
copyright 2006 Katherine Andrews
