Lame, Erect, and Proud

Looking at my own warped and knobby image in the faucet of the bathtub, I realize that I am not only “Handsome” Jim Manitoba, Pugilist Extraordinaire. I am also Hephaestus, club foot. I am proud of my deformity, my dissimilitude, my difference defines, clarifies… Every room of the house is a metaphor of a place inside myself. Or does the place inside myself mirror how the house is made? Another toke, relax a little more into the murky, steaming water. There is nothing real in my living room, nothing aesthetic in my bedroom, yet in the small, confined space of my bathroom, I may be free, I may be Hephaestus without shame, without lie or facade. My chaotic self-energy is formed by the feminine hands of my environment, and I am not angry at what it has made me. The language of my inner dialogue forms my house, I am a product of it, a servant of the Mother Bee, my home, my society, free to be as I am, Hephaestus, Club Foot—a bivalent builder of forms, molded by those forms I make—lame, erect, and proud!