‘Stop Motion’

Photographer - Tobi Brun

Stop Motion

On Monday
when the drudgery
Piles up
Around you
In once-used rags,
We call them “circumstances.”
They encircle until one
task at a time
crosses itself out.
Here you are,
like me,
sitting in your room
next to second-day clothes,
Catatonic,
lights off.
When what excites you
turns its back,
Always says, “Not it!”
Right in your face
but still stacks up
to-dos in heaps,
we call it the grind.
Somehow the sadness, though
it doesn’t
Ever deflate itself, does it?
It whirls, instead,
blurring tepid air
through cracked fan blades.
What would I have to sell
from the store of myself
to have any
of the following:

Encouragement, affirmation,
Clarity, a fast-forward
through summers,
and Januaries
While we’re at it,
A clothes-folder
that will do the work for nothing?
Popularity, validation,
Approval that sticks to my ribs &
delights for more than five minutes,
Empathy from others,
the organic kind --
Not the type my mother
translates to my father,
Authority figures that like me,
Naturally re-uptaking-serotonin —
Probably everything
listed here has only
Promises
in return
for the pockets
I’ve emptied,
Wishing, oh
well, I’ve tried
turning inside-out
my hopes
in front of these traitors,
only to watch the floor drop
as I ascend
with or without them.
It’s OK to
stick me to the wall:
Praise or humiliation,
I’ll take either

If you just notice,
Notice
me
here.
Find my detestable failings and talent
and tell me straight --
Removing any semblance of ambiguity
smearing how you hear my name.
Don’t pitch me carelessly
as second-day clothes
on a creaky chair,
depressed.
Take me out so I can unwrinkle
in the sun:
Touched like someone god chose!
-- When what I most want
is to cower and shrink back inside,
crumpling in
stop-motion,
killing
the
light
on
my
way
Down.

Maggie McCombs is a managing editor, poet and neurodivergent neurodiversity advocate hailing from Lexington, Kentucky. She has work coming out soon in "Half and One," "Wishbone Words" and "The Write Launch." She lives with her husband, Anthony, and their four pets.