honeydunce

epilogue of the bear trap
I sleep in a square. I bookend my profiles with pillows and I keep two below my head. Waking means lifting and climbing’ sleeping means sinking. I dream surrounded.

In the back of the house, rotting limes. They liquefy. Porous green to a brown gray mass, happy dents.

Tell me what surviving did to us. Tight mouth and buoy boats—I’m not buying it. I stand in every aisle of the store, ignore the weekly list. I have no plans. I try to buy them, place my grip around new ones in the far back. Does everything I own have an expiration date? How is my blood? Is it everywhere? Is it obvious? Do I need more?

Successful hand transplants. Do the veins and nerves ask each other to dance? Do they tangle like tree roots, fire their guns into the other’s shins & lapse into tango for life?

My coat attracts snow flakes, stellar dendrites on my shoulders and sectored plates up the nose and on the lips as I walk from the bus to the house. I push my hand into the pile of it growing on the car hood. Sometimes I like winter I guess.

While crossing a street I imagine falling again. Why do I do this so much? Imagine falling and then various scenarios trip wired in the wake. A car can’t make the turn, no one feels obligated to help me up. Imagine laying there, cheek in a pothole. How much of the world would that change?

I am pretty sure that everyone in my office loves salt water taffy. Whenever a coworker goes on vacation, a box of it appears in the common area. The packaging is always my favorite part.

I really love Danielle Pafunda’s work.

One of my goals for the year is to see the ocean. It’s been so long. Much too long.

The bowling alley makes a solid shirley temple. Although I don’t understand their latest furniture additions. And the women’s room, all red. Even the toilet tank covers in their shaggy carpet glory were a deep shade of it. Was I in the restroom, a capillary?

Another metaphor of the migraine–beetle in a bug collection, false bottomed cigar box and pinned with still twitching appendages. Giant with thumb pressed against a leaf playing dead in the wind.

Say NO to this bullshit censorship.

Your face,
a dagger smacking
back moonlight.
Grin made of molasses
spreading out the center.

It is here,
tucked in the lesser referenced corners
of rotating clock,
where every suspended disbelief drops,
lunar light finding your crooked tooth
to sparkle like diamond,
to render all crickets silent and blinded,
to disorient blades of grass left bent
in the imprint of your body.

Never you mind, paper plate sun,
yolk below the mountain uncracked–
celestial salt in clumps of punctuation around
head. Sleep is not for us.

how all lungs in the room
flutter flatten ripple
with vibrations.

Restless. The clock sounds loud at times like this. Visiting family for the holiday, spending much time in the imaginary world of the four year old niece–we build and rebuild kingdoms for the captured princess and the evil prince keeping her there. I am fidgety, all muscles twitching. Workouts have been minimal–I’ve resorted to crunches and push-ups by the handful before I go to bed and when I wake up. This pesky foot injury. I can’t stand being held back by something physical, tried convincing myself multiple times that the mind can override any inner ailment yet I’m still hobbling around here and there. And then while pushing the nephew at full speed round and round the house in his Fred Flinstone-esque car I kicked the wall with the same bad foot, cracking my second-to-last toe. Nice and purple, swollen, will not bend, feels like an added appendage within the sock and shoe. Oy vey.

I am not a star pupil when it comes to patience, not for things like this that seem so trivial yet have such an impact that I must change the very way I walk. In the car today we passed a jogger along the road and the envy I felt boiling up in my sternum was real, real enough to be a bitter taste in the back of my throat. How fortunate and for granted we are when all of our parts work in their normal fashion. And when they don’t? Kind of like the world ends. At least that’s how I feel about it.

Aside from the hobbling, I don’t have much to say on these last few days of 2011. It occurred to me(quite some time ago) that the real celebration of a new year comes with the birthday. A more literal interpretation, one I can get behind. I’m not really big with resolutions–the whole “changing on day one” and going from there. If change is wanted/needed then by all means do it now. All this to say that I’ve reached no pivotal decision or truth or realization about the past calendar year. I own no neat bow to tie it with. Or maybe the bow can be a simple knot of splintery twine: hobbling sucks. That is all.

One of these dead ends, which is it? One where I and a country boy kissed in the grass as if things like parents, age differences and chores never existed. Two things against the earth with grins and elbows, anemic shins.

I am trying to find your porch light. It is dark, I am tired and miscalculating the distance between then and now.

It seems I’ve grown into something more forgiving, something soft. The butter left out, heap of deceased animal in its final coffee grind stage, right before the grass grows over it in newborn green. Guess we all swallow thick that nothing is permanent.

Lean temple and cheek on the juke box, bottle neck in the hooked J of index. The tiny sway of hips. From behind it is the saddest thing. Your covered limbs tired from arm wrestling. The fade of the street out of reach from the neon.

We go back and rebury it. The fence of your father’s house is starting to buckle.

Pull the first floor around us, draw the table and curtains into our ribs. We are starfish stuck to what built us. Moths caught in the shade making light dim.