Posts for June 22, 2024 (page 6)

(An erasure and excerpt from the script of season 5, episode 15 of Breaking Bad’s “Ozymandias”)

Gloaming hour walk leads
Glaring of cats to the park
Marmalade tigers
A dapple of piebald coats
Overseeing duck feeding

It’s the cloudless, sky blue walls that I dwell on most
when I recall my journey through a hospital gurney-
sky blue walls and a clock straight ahead,
the minute hand mixing the anaesthesia.
Nobody else in the room, circumstance leading me
into my first surgery experience completely alone.
Never once a broken bone or stitch sewn, never once
an IV drip, I had imagined myself…terrified.

But in the moment of, there was just sky blue walls;
a second hand ticking another 360 degrees.
Drugs were definitely at work; they told me
this and that will help keep the anxiety down,
though there may always be some part of me that thinks
it was really the serenity of doing what must be done
singing lullabies like a mother putting children to sleep.
If I close my eyes, the fireflies can come out.

A nurse or doctor visits every few minutes with questions,
the same list of questions dotting i’s and crossing t’s.
I give the same list of answers and wonder
if all this is done just to pass a little more time.
Then it’s a group of personnel and the gurney is moving.
Grey ceiling tiles replace sky blue walls, the clouds
rolling in, yet fear of the storm cannot will not touch me.
The operating light shines like the invincible sun.

My father is there when the fog of anaesthesia lifts.
My brother is bringing the car around. The plan
is to do recovery in Owensboro, surrounded by family,
in good hands now that the worst is over.
I rest well in the car, sleeping much of three hour trip,
talking when awake about how smooth it all was.
When quiet, I watch the trees and hills slide by
with nothing but blue skies above the whole way home.

Watering the garden I found myself grumbling about the heat.

Giving no thought to the blessing of being able to water that garden.

I find a tomato a few feet from the plant with a bite out of it and more grumbles flow.

Giving no thought to the other tomatoes I have that are ready to be picked.

I come inside to find that the dog thought it was the perfect time to get in the garbage.

Giving no thought that it doesnt happen that often and all the snuggles I enjoy from him.

 I am beginning to see a pattern to my day and I close my eyes for just a few seconds and open them with a new point of view.

I see that the laundry is over flowing which means that I have more than enough clothes.

I forgot to wash a pot on the stove from last nights dinner, a dinner that I had with one of my favorite people in the whole world and it was forgotten so we could watch a movie.

So many little things and little bumps to throw my day off yet my blessings are so many more. 

Giving a little more thought I set down and write.

when I take a deep breath,
a kind of pause, a kind
of time out, a kind of spell,
a hawk swooping between trees
suspended in the sky,
a wave in a river hanging over itself
softly dribbling water drops
back into the current,
the wind sucking on my neck
until a hickey grows, a heron’s legs
outstretched across the sun
behind its curved neck,
the music of life blending
into a mantric hum,
and you want to ask about magic baby,
you want to see beyond the veil?

with my red welted
cross and your desire       to please
         manners behind my bared teeth
         and your clear        rimmed glasses
    our pop synthesizer faces
and pet names                        don’t we make
              such          pretty           pictures
         for our parents              and the baptists
in the next             waffle house booth?
     shrieking genderbent           radio
flailing           60mph        rear 
                                             ending lexington’s
last fuck         to give

      you can pluck      my eyebrows
while i tie              black bow            above
            your white sweetheart
neckline
                        let’s just get it down      on paper
            so it can be                          burnt
at short notice                    in the just married
                 suburban minivan
       towards                             harvard law
we can         discuss
             God               ‘s opinion
                      social          constructs         growing
       up                     names               words
                clauses                                    necessities
                                         and we won’t forget to high beam

                               for the breathing                   blinking
            shutters                                    by the gas pumps

on the porch swing,
supposedly reading

on the toilet,
waiting to start

in the church pew,
pretending to listen

at the doctor’s,
waiting for the needle

in bed, waiting for one of us
to maybe get it going

standing in line
to view the casket

So when the time comes for me to be still

The unfurled map of night sky
above us, the spaces between 
stars we knew full of glittering kin.

Our first real trip together,
the moonroof of your Plymouth Neon
wide open, letting the starlight

pepper us.  Our relationship
just being born, we just
couldn’t see it yet.