Learning Disabilities (poem story)

 Learning Disabilities
~
I take off my glasses to turn the volume down, and through the dumb/cognitive fog one of the other patients says something about my hair, or my ears, I can't tell. He smells like sulphur, that noxious scent of animosity turned out of perceived ridicule. "What?" I say. "You're in my seat!" It was empty when I walked into the cafeteria, I just got my tray and start forking up the eggs & sausage. "He don't know any better!" He's in my seat!" I tried focusing on breakfast. "It's too early for this shit!" (They micromanage everything around here, we give up our poor drug/addict freedom just to get a bed, warm showers, etc. and they mix in the absolute dope finds with us timid, casual drug users (potheads, drunks, simple garbageheads and this is what you get.) "Get our of my fucking chair!" It's not his chair, obviously. I don't know if it's mine either besides I'm sitting in it because I sat in it first...so I try to work at the plate of food, figuring to get the meal down as quick as possible but this narcotic-drenched asshole has some different ideas. All they know is passive-aggression. Some visual/switch was activated in them in the once-upon-a-time and so now I look like the answer to all their nightmares. Imagine me, this adolescent man just over the divide of middleage, 150 lbs. on a fat day, who sometimes talks to himself and sometimes hears his own voice, accidentally controlling every shitty thing around him. "I'm gonna crack your head like a glass plate if you don't move, bro..." I'm not his bro and I sure don't want to be. I don't want to be anybody's bro. I want my bed and my showers and my meals and to get out of here and back to____ while I've got some legs & private parts and years to capture and preserve whatever energy & purpose are left for me. I put my glasses on... Something like a half/insect/filmrobot, like a rejected Star Wars/Cronenberg creature is hanging about 20 ft. over my shoulder, my table with this xenophobic wrath, bloodblack eyes that mean to devour me, bones & all and not a security guard, therapist, janitor within screaming-range to be found.... I finish the rest of my food, clean the plate down to where you can hear the plastic fork drop onto the plate. And then I excuse myself and he sits where I was sitting as I make my way out of the cafeteria. 
I know I didn't take the same drugs as everybody else. I wonder if I can make my own time. 


****










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