INFATUATION OR OBSESSION

The things that make me angry
are the things that drive me mad
and little's worse than hugging
when quite 'nough hugs are had

perhaps I'm oversensitive,
so correct me if I'm wrong,
but aren't we s'posed to ask before
we touch for times so long?

less ruinous than war,
not shocking near as murder,
but somehow just as awful as a
jaguar for sheep's herder.

Truly, inoffensively,
the cherub casts his gaze
on objects of affections, with
which he'd like to lay

obsessed to death, he boldly claims
that you're his lone salvation
care thee not, he'll tell you plain,
for love's his new sensation

and if that mark refuses him,
be certain that you'll pay!
And rue the day you passed him up
and made him feel dismay.

Cupid's arrows, repute fair,
they point in all directions
drawn back, then released in air
to cite some new affections

pale-rose suits, and fairy's wings,
polite in all they do,
they know not where the road may go,
but hope it leads to you

and if another's need is great,
they'll put their own aside...
to cast off arrows, instigate
new lovers far and wide.

But cherubs, lo, they have no sense
of others' needs before them
ivories too intimate, to
see what's in the forum

pucker, kiss, leaned in too close,
a diaper stained with wild abandon
arms too fat with baby's grace
to give them strength to land in

rather than accept their blame,
and cry for reasons fair,
they'll shriek their infantile dismay
to all who'll heed their wares.

Then a clash, of dolls in hand,
they have not had their way!
So now before The Gods Themselves,
they'll make you how they play

if have you lonesome, they cannot,
they'll see that someone does...
or perhaps, they'd seen their lot, and were
disgusted by your limbic fuzz.

manipulation, turn of phrase,
two dolls, angry, faces smushed
regardless of your realer dreams
which they'd prefer were too soon crushed.

* * *

If The Collector was serious about her ideals, and protecting her young, she'd have smacked them; for allowing themselves be seen in full by the neighbors, fearful for the incaution of both parties. Here, I was seeing the opposite: apparently, these cherubs had been born pure as bishops, and so had everyone else (unless perhaps they'd left their sins at home). It was like their mother expected the entire world to live in a thoughtless infantile utopia, just because she apparently did – where everyone is soaped and clean of sex, violence, or shame. I didn't need to be a psychologist to know she was lighting a ticking time-bomb by raising her children this way. Even her youngest was two years done with being an infant, though he had at least the lesser curiosity – which was a small breath back to my lungs, compared to the others. Their mother was beginning to lose my hard-earned respect.

Despite all my griping, when it came to me, The Sheller only tried her streaking once. It was when The Knight came visiting to play cards (before his final departure).
She came out of her room, dressed in not nearly enough and a fur scarf, and shouted, "LOOK! ISN'T THIS PRETTY?"
I went red with embarrassment, and pale with mortification. The Knight grinned my way and made accusatory glances, and I shook my head and stuck out my tongue in disgust.
Then I asked her, "Sheller, please return to your clothing at once. It's not appropriate."
The Knight said nothing more of the matter, but I could tell something in him was bothered yet again... or that he thought less of me, and that I'd sunken into this bog all around me. As far as I could tell, I was still wading the muck on the surface, stirring my boots from their swampy grasp.

When he left, I felt abandoned. For all the eyes on us from other residents, we never got a chance to properly say goodbye... not the way we had, last time we'd met. Unstoked by my surroundings but natural all the same, I was sorely needing it, too: the touch of another at my age and pace. But I supposed it was better not to open myself up at the time, in that way. I'd grown accustomed to denying my own sensuality, until it hardened into a layer of sheetrock – so I could remain as safe to be present with as possible. To make up for the whole family's degeneracy. Steel boxes stayed better-closed when you weren't swinging their hinges. I watched him go, and took a deep breath, readying myself to return to servitude and emotional squalor.

The children weren't the only ones being babied and diminished, despite their obvious interests otherwise. Unleashed on the floors, they demonstrated plenty, and were seen as comedians for it. I was starting to feel like a five-foot six-year-old myself, stuck on permanent caretaking duties. And The Rater kept buying me clothes I didn't want, begging me to try them on in my room and then show her in the hall. They were frillish and fancy, tight in all the wrong places, and made me feel like a cloth-porcelain doll. It was humiliating like I'd never known before. I decided, instead, to sell the clothes and buy my own again – to which she'd said I'd betrayed her, and wasted her money. It was only once I shared my natural talent for striking deals to refresh her cluttered storage that she saw me in lighter tones again; for when she tried to make yard sales, all her prices were too high and the sodded junk stayed on her lawn until dark. I was an expert in recovering and cleaning old things, as I'd become from managing my own – hand-me-downs included. A little seam and polish, and everything was suddenly worth its weight – but only if sold as an experience, more than as a simple ware. This was a specialty of mine, I found, that made it easy to justify my stay – or so I thought, until she'd glower down on me for not working again. She didn't mean the endless chores she'd assigned me, but a 'real' job in town, for coin. As if I had any time after I'd finished with the grounds. And wasn't she paying others MORE to do LESS of the exact same work, in the exact same house? This made me feel trapped all over again, with her, with The Oaf's visits, and with those frightening cherubs... who ran afreed like gnats in the wind. As they grew up a bit, the shrieking and streaking became less frequent, and they finally began to show some modesty. It was a welcome change, indeed.

Aside from those indecent incidents, The Sheller reminded me a lot of myself. I called her that because she was a seashell hobbyist, and adored the waters yonder. She always needed to see the waves from the shores and feel sand between her toes.
Her younger brother, The Clamper, liked to look for oysters instead. He hung around the local fishermen expectantly, dreaming of a glistening pearl. His father had once told him if he'd found one, he'd become gloriously rich. He was as clingy and resolute as ever a child could be, and once he'd decided you were his, he'd force his arms aviced to you, and never let go. This was heart-warming at first, but grew tiresome as I lifted him and his brother into the air for the fifth time in a row. By only my arms at the sides, one child each. It was becoming a daily occurrence, and enough was never enough for them. Gradually, he became invasive, and a bit of a bully to his younger brother, and unexpectedly, to me. Despite his size, he was twice the confidence in half the storage – most of it completely unearned. He, in a fit of entitlement, dug his face into the small of my back and the crack of my ass, and nuzzled it in front of everyone. The Prosaic was a box of laughs most of the time, but when it came to children, he was dead serious. Nothing would get past him, and none would abuse one on his watch – except for yelling at them a little too much, which in his eyes, kept them safe. For this, I admired him, and found him one of the only stable influences in the entire family. But he looked at me with suspicion, as if I'd somehow encouraged 'that sort' of relationship with my younger cousin.
So I scolded him, the little brat, and told him "This is the reason I don't always want to spend time with you – I tell you 'no' and you go ahead and do what you want to anyway. What you did made me uncomfortable, and I want an apology."
But everyone else, The Rater, Oaf, and Collector, made excuses for his behavior, and found his violation of my boundaries to be utterly intangible. They did just as little when the children practiced kissing their other cousins in the halls, and even squealed and celebrated – calling it "cute". When they cornered their own siblings in the closets, I was, apparently, to stand by and do nothing for them – even though, as I mentioned before, the youngest of them was only four years old. I became so jaded with them, over time.
The Clamper complained, "SHE SUCKED AND BIT MY ELBOW!"
The Sheller whined, "NO I DIDN'T!"
I rolled my eyes. "Whatever you did, he didn't like it. Cut it out."
I shook my head, and watched them pass me from the sofa. They were becoming exhausting to manage, and were giving each other the kinds of mishandled affection I longed for; but only from girls my age in the village, or from The Knight again in my wildest fantasies. The Rater and Oaf kept me far too close on the grounds to ever try, and seemed jealous at the mere sight of a viable option for myself – anyone else who was teenaged was chased away through subtle jabs and malicious glares, and possibly even private threats. It was suspectable of them. I was never allowed company without some intense form of scrutiny, not even once. Nobody wanted to challenge them... they knew who "owned all the food". Forget love, I couldn't even make friends. Not a solitary acquaintance. Even our neighbors beyond the fence received a vicious stare from The Rater, for they in their elder years were apparently a threat to her sense of control over me – I wasn't to make polite conversation with anyone on her watch, it appeared. Yet The Collector's children were barely grown, and allowed to mingle like rodents – so it disgusted me, and made me angry. I was still a virgin, looking for love at my own appropriate age, and these tiny heathens were being groomed for a lifetime of anything but appropriate. I tried not to resent them, and to remain as peaceful as I possibly could. Eventually, that breath of sanction found me again, and I put myself back into my place. It wasn't their fault, anyway – they should have had a father to guide them.

Well, after the back-nuzzling incident, The Clamper became spoiled and welpish; constantly looking for a fight, locking me out of the house for a laugh, and running to his mother the instant he was caught. Respectful and esteemed though she was, she was simply too tired or too entertained to stop them... from doing anything they were regularly allowed to do wrong. She scolded me instead, and told me I was 'deranged' for instigating, or at least for reacting. I've only aggressed the wee bastard a few times, by my count: once, I'd held him upside down while he was shouting and misbehaving, having spilled red food and stolen purple wine all over a fine new carpet by sheer carelessness. He only laughed, having gotten what he really wanted: attention. Then, I'd set him on the balcony railing to see the sunrise – and he took that as a threat of murder by falling, despite my arms at his sides. It was his wriggling that scared me, so I brought him down before he could be proven right. That time, I had definitely made a mistake. Another time, he'd run away with his mother's wallet just as she was late to a doctor's appointment – for him, because he'd caught a vicious flu. For all his mother knew, it could've been the plague. I caught him on the lawn, tackled him down, and gave him the most reserved sock to the gut I possibly could, just to make him drop the thing. I was so sullen, so determined not to hurt him and to show him nothing but peace, and yet so, so incredibly angry. His ungratefulness and self-destruction was like a drunken cabby crashing his carriage for a lark, sending the whole damned thing and its helpless horse over a cliff and into the gaping sea. I chocked it up to fever, and left him there to get up on his own. He whined.
I said, "I don't feel bad for you, you little shit. Your mother's only trying to help you, and so am I."
Then I went back and helped him up, because I felt bad again. The flames had died back down to embers, and I was seeing the smoke for what it was. Just a damn show. The scolding I caught for that was just as bad, but between her and the lecturing of The Rater and the browbeating of The Oaf, I was already growing numb to it all. It was just more judgment, from people barely qualified at all to be judges of any kind.
The Clamper was physically sore for a day, and emotionally sore for a week. Every single incident seemed to sour his temper a little more – he was not the forgiving type, but a competitive spoil-sport who'd found himself enraged at a recent losing streak. He, apparently having been promised the entire golden world on a silver platter, by his now-absent father. He was always crying, yet never actually sad, except when he stopped and remembered that his dad was gone. Not dead, just... off somewhere. Being insane. Feeling responsible, while I played cards with his sister, I would promise to teach him when could tell me what they said. He always sat and watched, complaining, but when I last saw him, he still couldn't read them. Despite everything, it made me sad that I couldn't uphold that promise.

His younger brother was the calmest of the three, but had a shorter fuse than any of them. I called him The Tantrum. Though we had the most in common, I was unable to deny: his unmanageable episodes made him, at times, the least reasonable of them all. Stubborn and defiant, like I'd hope a child to be, but for all the wrong reasons. One week I was caring for him while he had the flu, and another I was snatching keys from his hands before he could scratch the walls with them. We were, after all, still trying to sell the house. Once, I was even forced (for a reason I can no longer remember) to yell in his face that his mother was "a rock", and he'd be lost without her. He only looked up and smiled at me, like I'd been playing a part in a particularly silly puppet show. So delicately sprinkled with madness, every last person there. And I was the only one who lamented it, for I too was beginning to grow mad with anger, resentment, and hurt. It was either that, or I could sugarcoat all of MY problems, too... and I'd grown sick of the rancid sweetness of sugar's taste on my senses. All of them, in fact.