Clumsy in a wet suit,
Climbing down into this hole
To the sound of rushing water.
Over big rocks,
Over small rocks,
Backward off two waterfalls
To get to the prize:
The current tugging
Our inner tubes along.
Pure darkness
And thousands of worms
Glowing like stars above.
i’ve been practicing in my head to sketch the lines,
organic and uneven, of the contours the clouds will hold
tomorrow. each time i belly-flop forward in rusty trustfall
onto them, it is more aptly described as as a sinking into:
the lack of ground that in itself grounds me;
the notion that clouds themselves are composed
of liquid; that to become one with a liquid,
one must find comfort in falling through undefined spaces
and molding into new sketched outlines.
so i stretch; i’ve reached my splits for the first time
in four years; my eyes are four inches below five-foot-two now
and with the extra quarter inch my vision sees far enough
around the curve of the earth to lock onto the words
that have not yet been etched into the dictionary, their unmuttered syllables
background noise to the hours spent half-bodybuilding in baby steps
among the heat and cardboard, earworm i’ll nurture.
say it’s a fine line between fear and excitement but both
fire up the same chemical inside; maybe two things can be equivalent
yet opposite at the same time. Maybe what we are not is, in an ambiguous way,
exactly what we are. Maybe definition is something arbitrary with the way
some new impression of meaning is felt in each stretched moment.
my (only) fear is the unknown, i am told, and i feel, and i despise,
and i dive for it in a rush too quickly to find footing
in the soft white of the clouds.
are their forms themselves
not illusions? are their masses of white solid in the sky
not liquid, void of foothold or handhold at all? Is that the fear, the thrill:
the absence of feeling’s ability to know what step may be unstable?
the pace of liquid, to move to so many unnamed locations
& new shapes in increments constant to the human eye?
the addition of a distance, the notion that for life to progress
it must be set apart from a known and felt familiarity?
what about this melting to become, this brightening in my gut
at the sight of a shade of blue i’ve never seen before awakens me?
shakes me inside, but to restart a heart? what about this art of stretching
to reach the top shelf each shift of my part-time job to support
being a full-time dreamer makes me feel so unsteady at the top of a ladder
yet willing to fly when no ground is even in view?
i’ll see how it works out,
i say, tracing in the crevices of my mind that form muscle memory
the sketches i’ve been drawing over and over at each thought of tomorrow
for the past two months. in another two, will i draw them into ink?
will i paint them, or will the dawn do that, refracting color
off the droplets of cumulus the adrenaline in me says i’ll be glad i became?
The calluses on my palms are living proof that you have to kill a part of yourself to survive.
Murder the fear,
drag it’s body next to the skin cells and hair strands.
There’s no room for you here.
Leave an old dream to die,
$80,000 burning in the wind
a hosed-down version of what you used to hope for.
I kept asking him to explain
phrases he’d say
until he figured out
my level.
“I’m at ground level with theory, man,
but I’ve played for a long time.”
Cracked open some shell chords,
vamped on “Bag’s Groove”
My improvised minor penatonic
chorus got a big smile.
“It’s cool. Not a lot of my students
want to learn this stuff anymore.”
For the first time in years,
my fingers stared impatiently,
expectantly
to my brain.
A zero’s not nothing
Makes the difference between small and big
Not how to express nothing
but how to express something
As silence prepares us for resonance
As spaces between the spokes
make the wheel
Zero’s where we start
What’s on the branch when the songbird
has flown
Perhaps where we end
Summer is shedding its skin
leaf-strewn and breeze straddled
the nights never still
sirens crickets lost deliveries
fireworks or gunshots
the willows drying their tears
if you close your eyes
you’ll miss the owl
its careen through branches
the stillness on birch
if you close your eyes
you’ll lose another decade
its lightning bugs
its tiny miseries
if you close your eyes
you’ll feel the years
their subtle thrall
this cursory experience
a heartbeat or an eternity
unexamined feels like nothing
right now I’m aware
that I am the fool
and I have a world to learn.
Breathe in.
