The Dogs

Been chasing the same thoughts like dogs around the same park most of my life.

Am I loved? Am I important? Valued? Will I be alone? Who will love me?

Been constructing my life, manipulating my life to avoid the less pleasant answers to those questions.

How in high school I realized that nearly every day someone commented on my great clothes, my long curly hair, how much weight I'd lost or what a great fuck I might be. And the way I started to mine for those comments, the way I began to depend on them, like bits of chocolate after a long day, the way I worked them, the way they made me feel; better, prettier, important, desired, loved, the way they made me feel less alone, less fat, less ugly, less unloved.

All the things I really felt about myself; my horrible curly hair, my fat thighs, my insecurity, my fat face, how you'd have to be deformed or drunk to love me.

Unseen and unimportant. Those are the dogs, the same dogs that still yap and nip at my feet. And no matter how successful, no matter how many golden rings, how much weight I lose or whether he wants to fuck me or she wants to fuck me, no matter if I get a phone call telling me that we love you baby, love you baby or another book gets published.

After the big manic ego flush passes though me, after the hot rush of intoxication, the blood bath pulses through me, drowning those dogs and their nipping and yapping

Those dogs are back

Dogs like thought s I've been chasing around the same park my whole life, nipping and yapping and biting and barking and me thinking most of the time that I'm actually getting someplace in all my business; edit student work, pick up jacket at the cleaners, call dentist, write that interview up, all ways I dodge the dogs, ways I keep them at bay, their yapping, their incessant cries, the ways they know me, how exactly where the stubby, curly haired Jewish girl lives and how unsightly and how unholy and how lonely and how afraid she is, sitting there planning and scheming ways to secure the love, the good feelings, making plans for the poison she will feed the dogs, like the burglar who throws the tranquilizer into the dog meat so he can rob the house.

I'm buying time too, entertaining myself, reaching for the next big thing; what I'll do on my birthday, what I'll buy myself, how great I'll look in that dress, whether it will get him hard so I won't have to listen to the sound of those dogs and their yapping and crying. Dogs like the same thoughts I've been chasing around the same park all of my life.