Day 64?

Lizard Nights


my skin, at the elbows
is where it starts.
i disintegrate into
rough and scaly
lizard skin
so i will posture in the sun
so i will wait for everyone to leave
so i will let my brain hand me
basic functions of life.
eat sleep talk shit die.
i am a lizard inside a lizard inside a lizard
my mind crawling over eleven different time zones
none of them the present
none of them
this moment.
i think about how:
when i was young i didn't believe i was real.
didn't believe i was Girl
at every doctor's appointment i curled inside myself and waited for the verdict.
i don't know what i thought they'd do
to cure loneliness, near-terminal awkwardness,
a lack
of easy conversation
of beauty and its rituals
of flirting eyes
of gracefulness
everything i thought girls were;
but i dreaded something definitive all the same.
i wasn't Boy. I wasn't anything shown on TV.
i wanted to be somebody i wanted to be frontal cortex
but instead i was the lizard in the corner, back brain, old brain, fight or flight brain
laughing and smiling because lizards do not know.

now i've grown new skin
now my outside is in but
sometimes i still hide in that self.
she comes out at night and i cover my eyes
hate the way my thoughts breed and the way my shoulders hunch
into the worn down slouch of a desert boulder.
they called me nice because i was nobody.
i liked everyone because they weren't me.

and now some nights i think maybe that's my human
hiding in my tough lizard skin, not
the other way around.