Misha doesn’t sleep. We have that in common.

I try my best to get stuff done when the house is quiet. Sleep for boys who have been raped and sexually exploited is a big bag of worms. Medical professionals in Public Health (which should be renamed Public Bullshit) never ask kids themselves about sleep. When Misha hasn’t slept in about a week, he just loses his shit, and becomes Mister Wild Crazy Clown. It’s really hard to reach Mister Wild Crazy Clown. Misha’s anxiety alone cannot differentiate between what is real and what is the Mister Wild Crazy Clown Car. The clown car always wins. I really loathe medicating him because when he’s Mister Wild Crazy Clown Zombie, we’re not making any progress toward Misha confronting his ghosts and he has a family of them. The medication is a crutch. But I only have 24 hours to work in any given day.

“Misha,” I think you need a pill.

“I want you to fuck me I am a bad boy.”

The people in the clown car and all of their various voices do not much like themselves. Misha tried to kill himself an average of two to three times a year. Every year.

“I’m not ever going to have sex with you, and come over here and get your pill.”

“Put it in my butt.”

Misha turns around, pulls his pajama bottoms to below his knees, opens his butt, and tells me to put it in there. “I want you to put it in.”

“I’m not going to put a pill in your butt hole. It’s not gonna happen. Misha, pull your pajamas up, and come over here and sit by me.

“I wanna rock.”

I wanna rock means Misha gets to sit in the big rocker and rock back and forth FAST until he’s dizzy.

“No rocking until you swallow the pill.” Misha puts the pill in his mouth, takes a gulp of water from a cup, and then spits the whole thing out like he’s a glorious fountain at Versailles.

I salvage the pill. I would usually have Misha clean up the floor with paper towels. But he’s running around the room screaming fuck me fuck me fuck me.

Just fuck me. Everyone is now awake.

Misha is taking pictures of us with his camera and laughing as he races around the room.

“Go back to bed. I will deal with him.”

They have seen the party in the clown car before.

Shaking heads. Eyes to the sky.

That men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains; that we should with joy, pleasance, revel, and applause (Misha loves applause), transform ourselves into beasts.

The people who did this to Misha are in prison.

The two hour drive to the prison – Appalachia has a lot of prisons – meanders through the mountains and the hollows to the flatlands where practiced in sorrow, there was always a counterfeit grief, and then there was the real thing. A token of distress was the eternal austerity of the prison. I could talk to the father. But not the mother who was in psychiatric. Psychiatric always makes me break out in hives so I was glad to not go over there.

The man had bloodshot eyes, talked softly with a deep drawl set against the light on the concrete walls. He never asked about how his son was.

I was not sure what I was going to get out of meeting this man who now existed surrounded by the damp hot layers of men who were menacing because they were menacing. It smelled like an old pot of soup boiled from an unmade bed. It was a place of scraps. Swallowed up. Rather out of emptiness than night comes quickly bedraggled in the suffering of the shadows, unyielding, remote, and no one sleeps.

What kid.

“I never had no kid. Who the fuck do you think you are.” He smelled like old vermouth, kitchen debris, and boiled potatoes.

This was evil and it was ordinary. Neither asleep nor awake, we sink back like waves on a shore, fathomless upon lost drowned shoals of memory like whiskey on the porch and the buzzing of the bees under the old oaks who talked in whispers.

He denied having a son. I must be deluded.

I have been called deluded a few times.

Before he was lead away in chains, he leans into my face. “I got no trouble with you. But if you got troubles with me, just remember I won’t be in here forever.”

Misha was a darkened room of pain and fire and then feeling the pain so he could slash his wrists with knives.

Misha was the clown and I was just the sleepwalker walking through the dust, holding hands, and looking up, drinking gulps of a jealous rain. I would take his camera from him because I do not want him to break it. We are all up on specifics nights when the devil and grief become chaos yet again. What I am given by Misha is the opportunity to put my money were my mouth has been. I will learn more patience from him or become a barn owl bitter as the world. We have made some progress with Misha and it has been anything but easy.

We run him.

Misha like a pony and skittish as a pecking hen.

We run him up and down the streets and all through the ryegrass of the bike paths that snake through this town of weather, dust, cigars, repose, and razor blades. What wound ever healed but by degrees.

  https://tim-barrus.format.com/tim-barrus/238927-i-opened-my-eyes