Back to Rofiah Breen's Artist PageTo the Artist's Page     Back to the Unlikely Stories home pageTo our home page
White NoiseTo Rofiah Breen's next piece


I'm telling you,
I'm not going to say the accepted thing.
So you can brand me as an ingratiate
or whatever else or ignore . . .I have been ignored
so many times it makes little difference . . .but I won't
say what you have trained me 
to say. In my dining room there are

faces that appear at dark, in day
disappear. They are real: one is two-faced,
another red-faced, the third I do not recall.
I will have to look again when I am in there,
when it is dark and the light is on.
How much does God love me? And why don't I feel
any of it?

Simple, you are supposed to be loved
unfeelingly; you are supposed to be grateful
that you can breathe, that the stomach 
can take in food and get rid of it.
And if you are sick enough you will be so.
I long for feeling to grow dead in me for the man
I loved, but the son of a bitch

just hangs on. And I know there isn't anything
to it, but it stays in my mind
as all horrible things have a tendency to,
and I keep hoping someone will say something
to dispel it as it dispelled itself twice
when I had to care for him, when I ought to have
cared for him. Yes, that

is it: the obligatory I resent; whatever is
required, I go against. Some being you
gave me: rebellion the only thing I can
count on, requisition the key to what
I won't do. Require me, then, to love
him, and I shall hate: anything requiring
my best will bring out my worst.

To the top of this pageTo the top of this page