Enter The Dragon's Dry Heat

letters are written, never meaning to send-- The Moody Blues

Under normal circumstances, a black man’s hands are too puffy; the dowager prefers an Italian’s better delineated masculine definition over that of a former factory, retail worker, and my caretaker’s hands look the part of a socialist labor poster. All fine and dandy, his rough fingertips, scarred fingernails which tint like fish scales etched in keratin. It is what he’s doing to me with them which leaves me unable to sleep. I already wrote Monday after midnight that I was too old to feel constantly jacked up, and in his logic, doing just that, jacking me up, will re-energize me, making me taut will break the blues, and I am not sure how long either of us can sustain getting a rise out of each other. Again, I’d berate myself for letting the script etch itself in my face, it is my normal maneuver, off or online, but, at the moment, I’m a little beyond self-castigation, out of reach for a cold shower, sort of. I know how to do it even in this machine, but the time involved means I have very little of it so that he wouldn’t find me in a compromising position by the time he clocks back in, and that’s too much brinkmanship. My primary goal here is to recover as much function as I can before and after the new power chair. He is doing that better than anyone else on this suddenly careening train wreck. I don’t think he desires me, but he’s enjoying himself making me spark, and whatever I posted about winding this down has gone out the window in complete lunacy with a man who doesn’t understand the divisions between conservative and liberal with a quadriplegic gone racist long ago. I probably always was one even before the city; perhaps this is the lightning bolt, the charge in breaking my own rules, knowing I am not going to change inside despite gratitude for his care. I imagine you’re glad your not inside my head, while he and I trade endearments and I expose myself in past stories he considers it his mission to heal, but this is in my past too, being the libertine who ends up paying some pretty shiny pennies, much as Paul Ryan paid with diminished legacy over the AHCA. Ryanism, which I once respected under John Boehner, has been vanquished, like a spayed cat on a hot tin roof. Are he and I going to sleep with each other? At this point it’s in divine hands, and to those we cede miraculous instances, and this is his power over me, while he's sleeping after a glass of wine.