Predawn is the most underrated time of day, if you ask me
Blurry lines and street signs
Cast in hazy yellows and oranges from the burning sodium vapor in the street lamps
That iconic suburban glow,
Stark against the impenetrable blueblack sky and all the mysterious silhouettes cut jaggedly against it.

(A staggering feat, to beat back the darkness. Humanity.)

The pavement shines bright gold - must have rained - fading to bronze,
rose,
purple,
finally disappearing into nothingness,
a question mark.

Pillbox houses,
neat rows in every direction,
squat mutely,
some with their own brief reach of a lamp in the window or the warm assurance of a porch light -
Even the occasional sharp cough of a security spot,
high beams razor white,
primed for each raccoon and every vague, faceless fear.

“We never thought it could happen here.”

Ah, but the unsalted dough of the middle class is a subject for the afternoon

This is the royal Morning’s expectant hour.
She wanders eternally,
accompanied only by her barefoot unrest, bathing the earth in her wealth of unspent moments,
untold riches of possibility streaming from the many secret folds concealed within the depths of her ermine cloak.

(Am I hopeful or fearful of the coming day? Are the paltry occupations of one electrified grain of stardust worth a thousand words?)

The flat sleepy windows of the sleepers and the risers,
grumbling caffeine addicts and early birds, night owls with their midnight oil long spent,
dreamer and seekers lost on the astral plane and the merry punching rumble of the bustling workforce’s well-rehearsed choreography hold court over this rarest domain,

while the Fates, ever watchful, hand select the paths to put before us.  
Each choice a thread.
Each decision a stitch.

It may surprise you to know that I feel sorry for you.

Yes.
You.

With your gigantic shadow,
Punishments fresh on your tongue
for any unfortunate friend or foe or relative
Who happens to wander across your path and blunders instead upon Vesuvius

You

Ever the open wound,
the heavy hand.
So much resentment to stoop beneath

it must be exhausting.

The cuts on your forehead so deep
The ****** of the sentinel’s spear
You’d have everyone believe they’re real.

I’m sorry to tell you
That every vicious blow and blown blackjack hand dealt:
blow backs from your own blustering
By which those fingers cast the first stone,
That voice eagerly weeps
and gleefully moans
Oh cruelty, oh woe!

You,
The alpha and the omega
The House and the player

I feel sorry for you
and your blindness,
That no one will ever speak up,
but instead will silently watch you run into walls.
You’ve conditioned us all,
As we watch you lay the bricks,
To take the blame for your bruises.

It’s a shame, too.
You have such beautiful gemstone eyes

And yet,
as any professional would tell you,

they lack clarity.

Ida!

What a name
From another world, you are.

It’s still your house, Ida.
Like all the **** I sold to manage this move,
All that **** is still
Mine…in a way…if you consider things to be infused with the life of the owner,
Which I do.
That Holy Grail, for instance,  gave me extended foot problems
From kicking the switch in the soft middle of my socked foot during every band practice at Karah’s house.
No shoes allowed.

So my foot injury now lives as a legacy in that pedal, even though my pipe fitter buddy bought it from me as his first pedal.
(He has money and real deal gear and I feel kind of sad for him that he’ll miss the experience of hacking away on a $300 setup with borrowed effects.)


So right we all get the metaphor, it’s one I use often, that we leave ourselves behind wherever we go.

And Ida, your pink appliances and your pink tile and your pink wallpaper
Well
It makes me
Glad
To know you.

We can share this home, this stake you drove into your own heart in 1960.
I’m glad you got to die here, Ida
Amidst your pink at 98.

I like pink too.
I do hope that if your spectral expression decides to reveal itself to me,
That it is to give me tips on how best to preserve the pink enamel sink
And not to box my ears for snapping the light switch
Instead of placing it.

The air is magic
In the same way a human nervous system is divinely inspired by tree roots

As tree roots seek other tree roots to bind to, sharing nutrients and information underground in secret tongues lost to time (but not to trees),
So too does the nervous system talk to our various insides,
electricity and fat and water and blood,
mysterious even to us as we haphazardly propel ourselves through space,
a mess of actions and reactions.

Magic

In the same way that time exists only because death exists
And death exists both because of and in spite of time.

And I am alive.

(If you ever doubt yourself, remember the incredible odds you overcame just to become).

Months maybe, a year?
We were unmasked in your home or mine,
Or on a walk
Or texting our words into knitted ropes that became our strength and our life line
And you said
“I never realized how connected we all are. That every moment spent with others, I am breathing their breath. We’re sharing breath, all of us, all the time.”

Oh.
Oh. Yes.
Lashes of breath like lizard tongues
Forked and solid and hot
Plunging and coiling;
Ariel losing her song.

(I carry this with me still, like I carry the threat of the possibility of blood drying in the veins, crystallizing there.)

A sharing of totems, airborne on the exhale, between the vastness of humanity.
Maybe it’s a
Heart,
feather,
child,
guitar string,
equation,
pet,
sense memory

- a bit of mustard,
a crumb of cheese -

a shame,
a secret,
an illness,
a loss,
a hope,
a flame,
a diary entry,

a passage in a story that is so written on your DNA that your ancestors will possess its truth and sacredness,

Not ******, but nakedness.

The unknowable intricacies that terraform the gallery walls of every life ever lived,
Each of us a cavern sprawling brimming with a trail mix of escaped fragments of other souls, nestled among our own wreckage and music and roots of trees.

This invisible connection to each other,
so wrought now, warped and vivid
against the sky.  
Drawing breath as drawing sword,
building blocks as barriers built,  
We are withdrawing from each other in our sick rooms,
dosed on breath from birth,
suddenly forced into thickened singularity for an easier swallow, weighted heavy on the chest.
Oh I know, it’s the X-ray blanket at the dentist when you were a kid
It’s Ian’s sweaty shaking hand during that first detox, 20 bars deep, wanting to tell him that I ******* told you so, I TOLD you. Knowing that no one’s voice would ever be louder than his own.

You look at me,
And I’m losing you.
I see it like bitterness on your lips
But I don’t mind.
You’re right, I’m exhausted too.
I wish I was better at being frank.
How, though, to make sense of this new world if not to drag the old world into it?
How to point and name and say “this is”
When all you know is what it is not?

Forbidden night, with your sheltered hours.
How I long to paint you in broad strokes, adding water to the brush,
That you may spread and extend your precious mercies beyond the borders of your designation,
up and out into the wicked day.

May the sun forgive me for bankrupting its grand offering in favor of the always-waning dark, when it’s easier to walk between worlds without touching.
Daylight brings out the conquerers and also the conquered,
creating a vacuum that devours the air between gaps in the dimensions,
the grind and squeeze of many lungs contracting at once.

And although every period of light and compression is followed by a period of darkness and grasping strangeness, I am never unsurprised by the strength of my enduring love nor less enchanted by the singularity of our shadowy and permissive embrace. I have traveled great lengths to con my own rhythms into abandoning  their posts.

Oh night, I hold on to you like a new bride at a military wedding,
resolute in the knowledge that you will only return once you’ve already gone.
No sooner do you pull from my arms do I finally rest, too early and too late for a gentle landing onto the unforgiving surface of the sunrise.  

the hourglass breaks and so appears Morpheus, great and ancient, to call down black night upon the wretched world.
For it was agreed that once per cycle, the world must lose itself in necessary madness, and thus rests the cosmic balance upon which fares the day

Is there anything more pure
Than a dog who curls up at your side
And leans her sweet meaty head against you
And falls asleep,
Dreaming her dreams as she snores?

A studied and precise move,
(the snoring is key for peak adorableness) clinically proven to woo your human into giving you a bite of her dinner.

I read a beautiful poem once by a poet named Mary Oliver
(My uncle will tear out pages of The New Yorker sometimes and keep them in a box  the way some people of a certain age do)
called The Poet With His Face in His Hands.

“You want to cry out for your mistakes,” she says rightly and wisely, “But to tell the truth the world doesn’t need any more of that sound.”

Mary Oliver tells me (she has my attention now, she speaks directly to me, my face in my hands) that if I’m going to do it anyway, that I should travel far away from civilization where I won’t bug anyone, a noisy place, like a waterfall or the Internet, where I can scream unheard, a tree falling in the forest. Where I can “drip with despair” unobserved by nature her very self.

Mary Oliver doesn’t want to hear it.

So I go.
I take my hiking boots and my entire supply of shame, guilt, rage, doubt,
Fear
I slip it all into a secret compartment just behind my ribs
And we set off together past the city limits to the wastes.
They’re crushing me, the wretched fruit of my faulty design. Too heavy to go on tonight.

I quietly wish Mary Oliver had never been featured in The New Yorker where my uncle would find her, where she would mildly wait for me to crash into her on my world tour of destruction.
I wonder into my dinner
(beans, like cowboys)
if Mary Oliver ever trekked to the waterfall, if I’ll find her there,
an etching, a manifesto.
I imagine myself stepping through, somber, monk-like, and Mary Oliver’s glowing apparition slowly gathering before me.
“You’re so cool and smart,” her energy-being murmurs,
and I wake up feeling important.

Cleveland is so grey in the winter,
my grandmother’s favorite color,
like that song.
The morning sky rides my shoulders and I feel deliciously tragic,
a broken-hearted pioneer woman, maybe, escaping into the wilderness to mourn the loss of her baby…****, too sad.

…to mourn the loss of her old mule Hank, and to find herself among the…
I look around. Generic Cleveland Trees. ****.
I wish I knew about local foliage,
everyone is impressed by a person who is At One With Nature.
I would know if I were a tragic yet somehow glowing from within pioneer woman. Head down, wondering how it can be 53 degrees on December 10th and trying not to think about the polar bears.
I soldier on.

Mary Oliver recommends traveling 40 fields and 40 dark inclines of rocks and water.
(A sweeping arial shot of me traversing the expanse, majestic hair blowing behind like Vigo Mortenssen at Helm’s Deep).

Beans again, like cowboys.

I feel good tired and wonder where a person finds quality poetic landscape like 40 fields and 40 dark inclines of rocks and water.

I didn’t really think this through.

An itch, a burn behind my ribs,
like stars,
like cravings.

A peek.

Just one! Just one, Mary Oliver,
just a ****,
they’ve been in there for days with so little attention.

No one answers, inevitably.
No one’s there, just me, always just me, alone with all of my worst days in the dark in the woods.  

Just one peek.

I wake up and its bright as hell.
What the ****.
What is the point of trees if they don’t dramatically block out the sun at your lowest moment?
The sun.
I squint and automatically say a little thank you,
the sun is so rare in the winter.
A ritual in the cold light.

I flash in, awash with readiness
It’s sudden
Something is coming or something was here but my stomach hollows out like a fake-out gut punch

Was here
Something was here, last night, it’s surrounding me on all sides
Yes that’s right, I remember and Im sorry for the remembering because I’m creative
and before I can stop myself
I’m swallowed whole into the darkness
Just like I wanted.

It’s a struggle,
The swirling absence of light from last nights indulgent, masochistic self-harm parade has expanded like smoke to fill the third space of my body. I am 2 dimensional, a 3rd grade drawing of a person, flat and scribbley, a poor representation.

They always come back.
Sure as eggs.
Sure as taxes.
The greatest hits, everyone was there,
Ripe and healthy,
My well tended heirloom misery, dismal in the garden and aching to stretch its creeping vines.
A vessel to feed on, a disciple,
Bleeding on the alter of self sacrifice, oh happy dagger, ecstatic drag over the open mouths of those cherry coals. Faithless and perfect. Crimson crisp is a broken spirit,
Brittle like nails, and sleep, and ego.

My friends, too, wars within wars. Pale and desperate. Trauma-bonded and aging faster than their parents did, who bought a house, who had three kids, who saved for college. Wars within wars. Shame, guilt, rage, doubt, fear. Pain. So much pain.

I’m lost.
I’m lost in the ******* woods and this poison smoke so black so black it’s in my eyes burning my throat my lungs swirling now sure as eggs sure as taxes I repent I release my will please it’s crushing me I can’t make it Mary Oliver, you shining city on the hill, where are you, Im losing, Im alone, alone, no one knows
Not a cowboy, or a pioneer, or a ranger, or a monk in a waterfall cave.

I’m a poet with my ****** face in my hands.
I’M THE POET WITH MY FACE IN MY HANDS AND I WILL NOT FEAR CRYING ALOUD FOR MY MISTAKES.

They come then. Every one of them, as I knew they would, just outside the gate and waiting ravenously  
My endless flaws  
Powerful and obstinate in their glaring humanity
The constellations of hurt snaking from the roots of my well kept garden
Barbed and bound to everyone I ever loved. The horned monsters of unresolved trauma and the ego machine

Deafening static roar, mechanical swarm of devouring plague locusts
descending upon the 40 fields
Oh here, oh now
In the dark of course
Where else but the smoking vessel of my brokenness
I want to laugh at myself for constructing a cliche within my own self reckoning
Choking on my own toxic exhaust and crying  and choking
This is hysteria, I think
Blurred and muffled on the edge of the hole, a ******* slurring descent, it’s there if I want it
I could dive in and

Mary Oliver.

What is happening,
What the ****, Mary Oliver?
Of whom I’ve never seen a photo,
who is crowning now from the bubbling tar pit, who has chosen this  moment to reveal herself, a nice touch.
She rises from the epicenter of my chaos
Like a blinding beacon of holographic light
(Again I check in with myself that it’s weird she is holographic, why is she made of rainbows)
Beautiful and terrible and 10000 feet high
My mighty dragon. What an entrance.

I laugh again, of course Rainbow Bright  is my big bad, how did I not see this coming, the final girl against the final girl, myself against my greatest self betrayal
She is me
She is arbitrary denial
She is suppression and avoidance
She is vying for approval
For attention
Validation
Every embarrassing moment and every unbidden 3am attack of self loathing.  
Shame and guilt and doubt and rage and fear.
She is my pain, this awful manifestation, this truly depressing personification of all of my absolute *******…

MARY OLIVER I AM THE POET WITH MY HEAD IN MY HANDS

Blink

Blink blink

She turns and sweeps down
And grabs me tightly, ****, oh god you have a nest dont you?

Through the air and I’m wet and dripping and…
is this a cave?

An etching, I have to find something
Something
A manifesto
I desperately search and my teapot is boiling, boiling, boiling over

And there behind that jubilation and water fun
I find no trace of Mary Oliver, who is me and I am her

There in that moment when nothing has been gained and my body begins to release from its own tension and collapse into itself from exhaustion and despair
I notice the air
Fresh and cool and fragrant and something else too
My dragon, far from slain, squirming a little inside me, feeling prodded and suspicious of this quenching.
At least we had this moment
Oh it’s you
Oh god it’s me

And finally then,
I throw my head back

And wail.