the oxy-moron

I had a pimple once--
largely a tiny blemish--
but when it wouldn’t go away,
when it just sat there, quiet and well-behaved on my face,
comfortably situated like a gracious house guest who won’t leave,
who has outstayed an invitation he never had,
when it did absolutely nothing as hard and fast as it could,
there on the back of my forehead,
I found I had begun to obsess about my abscess--
I was the Restless Patient.

At one point, an odd line of thinking struck me:
what if, as a symptom, it filled out, ballooned, snowballed into a kind of volcano?
A real nightmare, clearly. Or not?
I’d be Volcano Man - no, Lavalier Mike, Suburban Superhero.
I said my name out loud, intoning it like a transforming spell
in some dramatic comic book.
When nothing happened, I realized
words do not make reality. A pronoun is not a person.
Saying “volcano” won’t cause a volcano,
even if the word erupts from your mouth
like lava.

A few hours later, I had a minute eruption
when I was stuck, trying to find a solution for a problem with a friend
as we filled out a sheet of transformations for geometry class:
you know, homework.
The pimple hung heavy on my mind, if lightly on my face.
It couldn’t go anywhere - my thoughts raced,
fixed on the swelling,
and transformed me into an idiot.
My friend suddenly exploded, “Ah, that’s it!”
but I heard the same words differently:
“Ugh, that zit!”
and I blew my top,
my thoughts melting into words carried along by my emotions.
I had become the Supermoron, Idio-tick, biting my friend’s head off:
“I used an Oxy-10 solution!” I fumed. “I can’t just erase it, you know!”

Profoundly confounded and openly wounded, my friend closed his book.
“Clearly we’ve shared a misunderstanding,” he said coldly,
then took the coat
and went away just like the pimple wouldn’t.
And a chill shook me
and I understood my mistake
and I thought,
if we both now understand it, was it still a misunderstanding?

Words aren’t lava.
If lava finds you, there is no mistake about it.
It will coat you and fix you
just exactly the same as you are
when you first fall under it, fall victim to the fumes
and the liquid rock whose heat will leave you unchanged and frozen in place -
a lump on the face of the rock -
until some future someone surveys the area
looking for the right imperfections that will carry him back in time
and breaks open the lump
and finds you in that same embarrassing position
and says to his equally unknown future friend, just a little ways off,
“Hey, come look at this idiot.”

Later that night, I looked up “lavalier,”
since I didn’t know the word.
Turns out it’s just a certain kind of suspended rock,
that can have special meaning for good friends.

I popped the pimple,
though in the past many have ordered me not to mess with such things
on account of it leaves marks that way--
in fact, I have a friend
different from the friend with whom I worked transformations
(not that it matters to you since you don’t know either of them)
but anyway I have a different friend
and his half-sister popped pimples her whole life
and now her face has been transformed by tiny dents--
the coordinate points of her poor behavior--
like she was hit with very small rocks
or very big words.

As I popped it
and I allowed my foremost thoughts to take me back
to what happened with my friend,
I imagined us as two cartoon heroes in a boxing ring:
General Specific and Private Public,
our words in balloons above our heads,
both hoping a left cross will be the right move.
I saw the lines drawn on paper locked in battle,
and I couldn’t erase them.
And I wondered,

Could a civil war start over something like this?