I want to tell you about my car. I love my car. I can see her when I look out my window. She’s right there . . . the white one, the smallest one, the one missing all four hubcaps.

Why do I love my car? Confession: I have actually hugged her, walked right up to her cute, smiley, VW Bug face and hugged her in front of friends and others who may have been watching. Her name is “Jitter” and I love her because she’s got problems. Quite old in car years, she’s got rust in her creases and joints and her undercarriage. Her brakes grumble when it’s cold and the speakers rattle, even when the radio is tuned to the classical station.

I love her because of her frailty, not in spite of it. I love her because her condition and character match my own. She doesn’t quite fit in, and yet she fits in most spaces; she behaves younger than her years, tends to go over the speed limit when she can, and has a sweet disposition.

I’m single, but if I was paired with someone, they’d have to be just like me . . . only a little better at some things, evenly matched in most other ways, and slightly lacking in the few skills I am somewhat confident in—like meditating, staying equanimous when the ***** hits the fan, making do with very little, and . . . parallel parking.

Thinking inside a box, how seldom she had done this, so not her style.

“Give me a box,” she’d say, “but make it so big I’m not aware it’s there.”

A box as big as the sky—or maybe as big as one’s native tongue.

Hers was a style so ungoverned so unschooled it was invisible.

Forget poetic forms—she outsized the confines of biology.

At birth—given outward indicators—she was classified as “male.”

“Oh yah,” she’d say, “tell that to the handful of men who guessed otherwise.”

Men whom—in the thrall of lust—she’d let lead her to darkened alleyways.

Men who mouthed her mouth, lifted her dress, probing for what they’d never find.

She would try to warn them, but they were too drunk, too possessed to listen.

She was one of the fortunate ones who didn’t end up in the morgue.

So many are lost because they can’t be kept in well-defined spaces.

When we began drawing lines on the earth borders erupted in flames.

Imagine a finite universe and it will take your breath away.

The significance of the day
on which I was born was given to
all of us by my working-class, coal
mining ancestors whose sweat,
blood, and healthy lung tissue
were sacrificed to the
god of capital.

Whose dedication and fierce
struggle for the right to
one ******* day not devoted
to god or the ruling class brought us
this Saturday on which I entered
the world with raised fists.

It may be that you
outlive any one of
your beloveds.

What will you do then?

Will you collapse like a
bubble in a pollen-dusted stream?

Will you choose to join them?

All things are possible.

What a thing this is—
living a continuous birthing
of possibilities.

Remember to turn out the light.
Remember both of your sons.
Remember your sister, and your dear friends—
those most in need first.

Remember the breath, always
the breath, as many of the
20,000 or so you
breathe in a day.

Remember to say “yes”
Remember to let go.

Remember to accept yourself
as messy as you are while asking
that you grow in wisdom and compassion.

Remember you will die.
(You are already old.)

Remember you will lose your
loved ones and all your possessions.

Remember you will suffer pain
and sorrow and half the worldly winds.

And don’t forget to remember to remember.

This is where you are.
There is no other place.
No other “You.”

Not the little boy so wanting
to be like his cousins—
red-cheeked, curly-haired girls,
all of you sitting in a circle in the sand,
your father in white t-shirt and khakis
towering benevolently above this
cousined assembly in the back
yard of aunt Jean’s house.

Not the expectant father/doting husband
standing at the window of UC Med Center
on Parnassus Street at 3am gazing
at the untrafficked street 14 stories below
listening to the in utero heartbeat of
the being already named Alex who will
make his dramatic entrance
five and a quarter hours later.

No—right now you are in your bedroom,
colorful scarves draped on the walls,
dresses in the closet seldom worn anymore
due to pandemic circumstances.

You are here—breathing, reclining on
your bed wondering if there is any way out
of this besides a decorous curtsey —
a bow to the muse of time and the
“ineluctable modality” of change.