water mark

i realized i have a watermark 
on my face. in every picture i show up
as a gender instead of an organism.
today someone called me a "beautiful lady"
which felt like a shawl draped over
my shoulders in the middle of august. 
i am always too hot & always too cold.
i drive my partner mad when i switch
the car ac on & off as we drive to 
a red pin pushed into the dirt. if i could
i would sleep for a whole year. no no 
not a coma i mean like really sleep. 
get so deep in a dream that it becomes
a video game. when we first started  dating
we wanted to do everything together.
i bought a video game consol we never used
with money we didn't have. when i was younger
i would try to scrub the watermark off.
i bought bleach & steel wool. my partner admits 
he once used sandpaper on his skin. 
a tiktok i saw recently showed lizard owners
helping lizards get out of their dead skin.
i thought, "i hope that's what the lizard wants."
if i shed my skin like that i would
probably keep it & hang it up in the closet.
i do experiments to see how & when 
the face recognition ghosts can see or not see me
in my little phone. the watermark is not my fault
or is it? i guess it's possible it's not there at all.
no one talks about it. maybe it's just not polite. 

sorry i got distracted looking on my phone. i have
no attention span anymore. did you know
that the word "tragedy" comes from two words
meaning "goats" & "singing"? dear god
so much is lost in translation. what if i never
get to have a really good cry again? what if 
the technology gets so good that the watermark
is thought of as beautiful? & to think i was once
a water creature. i could have stayed damn it
& maybe floated along in the climate soup. 
instead i have all the mirror-staring & a bag
full of videos tapes i made of myself when i was
a child. pictures of the early 2000s are starting
to look sepia tone & old. back in the day we 
had our tragedies out in the cornfield 
instead of on our faces. the trees & balling up
their fists with the last fruits of the year.
i am never a woman but sometimes i am in 
someone else's mouth. i have come to love
the irony of being always in drag. the intention
lost in whatever hungry i wake up with.
i want to be beautiful. i want to be gaudy
& goth & somehow still knowable.