Dog sees goD

Is it part of my being to be cruel?
Is there a black mark on my permanent record
to proclaim that I'm ruthless?
The fact is that I'm Amanda-less,
and Naomi-less,
and Zoey-less,
but not less for it,
lest I cast the wrong spell here,
and assert acrimonious aspersions.

Inspiration arrives suddenly, like an old
friend you've just been dying to see. But
just as fast, she realizes that she misses her house
and her bed, and
her boyfriend, and that
you were never really that great at it anyway.

Maybe it isn't that bad to be cruel,
when cruelty tends to the frightened inner animal,
like a dog fighting its way up the ranks.

Today, I'm not Olivia-less,
but will my self be one day less full of Olivia?
Those little bits of light that saturate my pores,
the flecks of pink that shiver wildly against ochre skin,
or the strands that swirl around my straightest
lines and coax them to curl?

When one day I am lying in a
hospital bed,
clutching my heart in terror and
my hands to the sheets --
when I am famous
for curious, one-off turns of phrase,
blinking less and less,
will I look back?

Will I be paralyzed by the decisions of the
Olivia-full, and hate myself for being young?
Will the stuff of 19-year old me
litter my body like some unwelcome fast food;
like beer bottles;
like pizza boxes; will my age be prostate to a scale?

The dirt of unknowing and the watery
mess of memory -- they'll coagulate into a muddy
quagmire into which dreams sink.
Maybe, they'll have said, this just wasn't the place to build a foundation.

But I feel every day as heavily as the last --
every moment is just as important as the last,
there's happiness in crisis,
and so maybe my life is more like a sandcastle
strengthened by caulkish nostalgia.

You can't prevent waves of
uncertainty from
crashing
with violence
upon the constructions of the mind.
But the capacity for destruction
goes palm
in sweaty palm
with a penchant to
create.

Is it part of my being to be cruel?