Casper and the Lonely Doll

01.24.01
11.23.03

The teacher drinks diet grapefruit soda from an aluminum supermarket can. The boy to my left has coffee (cream, no sugar?) in vending machine styrofoam. The general in the madhouse poem has an antfarm in his head. I used to have lizards crawling around in mine. I’m tired of hearing everyone say ‘crazies’ and I want to start gulping Xanax in sympathy. Prozac circus. The diet grapefruit is artificially flavored, and that disapoints me, somehow. “Allright, where are we?” I will have a dozen birds of paradise when wed. I will have Cavalieri bread bread and peacock stew. Everything we eat will be endangered. Somedays everything tastes like floating. I don’t like doorless stalls, the wet spot under the toilet or between my legs. Only the scent of lilacs on the linen pillowcase—I imagine myself in blue silk drifting noiselessly on wax floors through a lemon-dusted house. Not everyone aspires to being a ghost. Casper warped me. Casper and the Lonely Doll and Sara Crewe. The littlest elephant. Ping the duck. All the misbegotten orphans of the world—by the time you’re grown it’s too late for rescue.