The Waiting Room - Part 2

Back to Part 1  

There’s something invigorating about being in the room, at first. You are waiting for something. Something will happen, and it doesn’t matter that you don’t know what it is or what form it will take. It’s a special wakefulness of hopeful uncertainty that keeps your mind and body pulled tight like a guitar string.  It makes it hard to eat and sleep. You have to be ready; you have to be aware.

But nothing happens.

They send you crossword puzzles and math problems, The Officer turns the lights on and off; you debate the sheets and try to find the right word for the shade of yellow in each identical plastic chair. You create timelines. You ask questions. You build a veneer of sense over the insensible.

Still nothing happens.

The tautness you began with draws too far, until the sinews of your expectation start to pop or lag with overextension. The something you’re waiting for becomes salvation, complete with an aura of holy unapproachability. It falls into myth, though you don’t always realize it. In a final flare of faith, you defend, evangelize, project – you ascribe impossible goodness to this something you can’t define, to lure it to you with the blindness of your devotion.

Nothing happens.

***

Cambridge organizes us when he feels motivated. He must have been a good executive; he says that’s what he used to be, or still is, if time has stopped, which is one of our theories that keeps cycling back.

He coordinated the discussion about the sheets, when they came.

The room had been quiet in the lights and darks before that. psychokitten’s eyes were swollen from wakefulness and crying. They often were back then, before The Baby, but she could usually be cheered or chided to composure. There was no one, this time, to cheer her. Even Marco hunched alone, his brows knitted. The garbage pile heaped untended in the corner.

Cambridge had slowed to stillness in this time. I’d been watching him, morbidly fascinated with the process of his despair. His shoulders fell first; then his chest sank; his belly sloughed a fraction further over his belt. I could stand very close to him and he wouldn’t notice me. His familiar mask of charming confidence cascaded into resigned folds. Then he slumped against the wall and slid to the floor, where he stayed for a long time. 

When The Officer flipped on the lights to reveal the stack of white linens neatly folded on the linoleum, all I thought from my hard yellow chair was that I had slept again, and missed an arrival, again. None of us moved to pick them up or look more closely. We had all missed it. And we would keep missing it, and there were no answers, and nothing would ever be clearer than this.

Then Cambridge’s voice rang out, metallic against the walls. “Warmth or privacy?”

I looked up at him wondering for the billionth time if I was delusional; he sat immobile, just where he’d been, his face still and apathetic. As I watched, though, his mouth formed the words a second time: “Warmth or privacy?”

He rose unsteadily, with the focused exertion of a man climbing a mountain. He walked in a wavering line to the center of the room. He squared his shoulders, looked at each of us, and stooped to pick up the stack of sheets with both hands. His shoes clomped hollowly as he raised himself up onto the plastic seat of a chair, brandishing the stack high above his head.

“Warmth or privacy?”

No one responded.

“Come on. We have a decision to make. Sit up. Wake up.”

One by one, we gave over, shuffled to our feet, turned our sluggish thoughts out into our palms.     

“There you go. Now let’s talk.”

Cambridge arranged a debate, laid out the guidelines, moderated the proceedings. Marco, Harry, and I argued for privacy. We would hang the sheets up; we’d make spaces to be alone in.

“Look at these! They’re too thin to warm us up anyway,” sniffed Harry. He tried to snatch one off the stack but Cambridge pulled it out of reach. “The temperature is always the same; it’s not like we’re going to freeze.”

“Also there are the mental health considerations,” Marco added, in his light Chicano accent. “Without privacy one feels unable to escape. Unable to breathe one’s own air. I think we can all agree we are in an unusual situation here,” he laughed, a doctor’s laugh. “Shouldn’t we do all we can to squash our sense of helplessness? Shouldn’t one have a room of one’s own, so to speak?”

I’m not sure why I fought for privacy. It isn’t real privacy when you know you’ll still see the outlines of your neighbors’ bodies against the light, when you’ll still hear them sitting and rising, when their movements are so familiar that your mind will show them to you even when your eyes don’t. But I had to fight for something.  

We bickered for a while, and eventually privacy won.

To be fair, the other side didn’t offer an argument. The Officer rarely speaks and never takes sides, psychokitten said nothing but watched us, her feet tapping the floor, and Begonia countered every point with the same retort: “But I’m still cold!” In the end, we let her keep one sheet.

We shoved the corners of the other ones between the ceiling tiles, standing tiptoe on chairs, holding each other up, laughing at one another as we reached and stumbled. That night we talked after the lights went out and pretended that every deep breath didn’t make the walls flutter. They fell down before long. It didn’t matter, really.

***

Begonia pokes me with one sharp finger.

The room trembles in droplets on my eyelashes, its inhabitants for a moment blissfully undefined. I blink the sticky sleep away.

“He’s doing it again.” The old woman’s voice needles and cracks.

In the opposite corner, the figure of Harry sharpens. He squats, cutting his eyes at us. I shift The Baby into my other arm, waking her, to see what he will do. There. He’s watching her, not us. His gaze shifts with her.

She wriggles against me, her lips smacking, her tiny fists jerking. When I lift my shirt to feed her, Harry’s face doesn’t twitch. The Baby latches and releases and latches –the tension unsettles her.

Begonia shuffles to her feet. She leans forward at the waist and waves her hands at him as though he were a troublesome tomcat on the front stoop.

“Psshhhht!” she spits. “Sssssstt!”

Harry aims a stony grimace at her, gargoyle knuckles of one hand pressing into the floor.

There’s nowhere to shoo him off to. He’s still over there.

***

Harry’s transition into the room has been different, they say, than everyone else’s. I guess that’s to be expected; why should we all handle the same trauma in the same way?

Night got harder when Harry came. He screamed through the dark hours.

He hasn’t read the book that is his namesake. He wears glasses, and he has a scar. He was hit in the head with a bat when he was four.

He and psychokitten have been the youngest. They bonded at first. They would curl up together in the corners and she would trace his lightning bolt with one finger while he stared at nothing and told her in a monotone all the stories that his head played out when he closed his eyes:

The voice that spoke too fast.

The numbness.

In one nightmare he was a fly and he was also the giant finger that crushed the fly.

In another he was dropped from a height by skeleton hands, collected from the ground, and dropped again. And again. And again.

He was an epileptic soldier in one, his hand glued to his assault rifle, so when he had a tremor he fired wildly, shooting himself in the legs and murdering everyone around him as he fell.

The way he told his nightmares gave us nightmares. When he told the soldier dream, he recounted the searing in his legs explicitly. “It’s true,” Marco whispered to me. “What he’s saying … that’s too accurate. You don’t know that much about pain from playing video games.”

***

  

We keep a timeline, written on a crumpled sheet of notebook paper, stuck to the wall with a piece of gum.

The Officer is where the timeline starts.

The Officer keeps the time. From his place by the door, in full uniform and sunglasses, he periodically pulls a pocket watch from his belt, peering at it over his glasses. It’s the only timepiece in the room. He doesn’t let anyone else see it. The Officer controls the light switch; he controls day and night. This decision was made at some point on the far left of the line, before Cambridge. Begonia will not say who made it.

The Baby is where the timeline ends, for now, or always. We are always looking for new tick marks.

When I arrived, I represented two arrivals. I was about six months along then. Cambridge knew, right away: The Baby was a future event that would occur, a mark on the right side of the line. It would be good, for everybody. We were all Expecting. The Baby charged them with possibility; it flowed into them like an elixir whose potency I didn’t respect until after she was born, when their withdrawal set in.

Now she’s here, and the arrow still points to the right.

Continue to Part 3

The Waiting Room - Part 3

Back to Part 2                 
Back to Part 1

One night, when we were still trying to sleep in shifts, psychokitten told me she was certain The Baby would get called out before anyone else.

Before The Baby came, phsychokitten lurked, staying near the walls. She had done something in the life before, or something was done to her. We don’t know more than that. She used to talk as though she wanted to tell you, or as though she already had and you’d forgotten. Now she talks of little besides The Baby.

“You can look at babies without looking away,” she told me once. “That’s part of what makes them special, I think. You can look at every little hair rising out of her skin, and stare right into her eyes, and she will look right back at you and smile. That’s what love is, maybe. Not looking away. You know?”

This night, while the rest of the room slept, she reached out two fingers to touch The Baby’s peach furred head. “She hasn’t done anything. I mean, if that’s what it’s all about – what has she done, you know? She doesn’t deserve to be here.”

“None of us does, though,” I said. “I don’t think that’s what it is.”

“Whyever though, you know? Whyever we’re here, she has to be the exception. She’ll get called out. She can’t stay here.”  

And what if she does? I wondered. What if she gets called out without me?

***

Cambridge hangs a threadbare sheet from the ceiling tiles and pushes it against the wall. He makes columns with headings in block letters with the fat Sharpie he keeps in his front shirt pocket.

“OK. OK OK. Who has birthmarks?” Three hands.

Psychokitten: “We’ve done that one before.”

It’s a familiar exercise by now. We don’t know why we’re here instead of other people. We grill one another mercilessly, looking for commonalities. If we find them, if we figure it out, everyone is released. That will be how it works.

“Fine. How many from Connecticut?” One.

It goes on and on. How many nail biters? How many adulterers? How many with ancestors on the Trail of Tears? Who is the middle child?

The caustic smell of industrial ink floods our sinuses.

“Who has lost a close friend?” Seven hands wearily raised. (Even The Officer raises his hand, only from the elbow, from over there in his spot by the door.) We count them and glance at one another anxiously, with a self-conscious excitement of the type you feel when they announce lottery numbers – you know it won’t be you. But … what if it is?

We wait.

When nothing happens, Cambridge jerks his shoulders forward. “Let’s drill down on this one, then,” he says. “We’re getting somewhere! We’re getting somewhere now.”

How old were we when it happened?  Marco was eight when his best friend was kidnapped on their walk to school. She was wearing red canvas shoes. He remembered the wide white of her eyes as they dragged her into the back of a rusty sedan while Marco stood motionless on the sidewalk. He recites the license plate number to us.

What year? Harry’s brother died in his sleep of an undiagnosed heart condition in 1998. They shared a bedroom. His brother counts, he says, because he didn’t have any other friends.

Were we there when it happened? I was there when Cory drowned. The ice was too thin for me to reach him. When the EMTs arrived, I’m told, I was lying in the grass staring into the water, a thin frost on my cheeks. I don’t remember, though. I only remember his whimper when he realized no one was coming.

The Baby wriggles and clenches her eyes tighter. There was no baby on the riverbank. This is not the riverbank. Wherever this is, I am here. And psychokitten is weeping, her forehead on her knees.

It isn’t working.

None of the answers match up.

It doesn’t matter how deeply we excavate one another. All we’re doing is poisoning the air. We’re still here. It isn’t working.

Begonia, who was ravenously engaged at first, shuffles off into a corner. Cambridge calls her back. “We all have to answer,” he says. “Begonia, we all have to answer or we’ll never figure this out.”

The edge in his voice makes The Baby jerk. She begins to cry. I pull her close, her warmth filling my chest.

No one is making The Officer answer. These rules are arbitrary.

“Begonia!” In three fast strides he is there, his knuckles already whitening on her shoulders.

“That’s not my name,” she hisses, pulling to break from his grip. 

“What are you waiting for?” he screams into her ear.

“Stop!”

It’s my voice.

Cambridge whirls. The baby is wailing now.

psychokitten stands, wiping her eyes with her forearm, and pushes between Cambridge and Begonia to reach The Baby, taking her from me and wrapping her up in her arms.

No one speaks or looks at anyone else for the long minutes to night.

***

I count the washcloths I have left, the number of diaper changes. My stomach growls.

My chest expands with some feeling that might be dread, might be excitement. Must be dread. How should I be excited when I realize the world might be ending?

“Marco,” I call quietly. He steps unhurriedly to my side. “Are you tired?”

“Of course I am tired. I am tired of this room, I am tired of Begonia’s snoring, I am tired of no longer knowing my own name--”

“No, are you tired? Yawning, physically tired?”

“Why?”

I show him the thin stack of washcloths in my hand. “I don’t think the lights went out.”

He swallows loudly. He glances at The Officer. “Let’s talk to Cambridge.”

I glance at our executive. “No point.”

Today – tonight – today -- Cambridge is slumped on the floor again.

“What’s wrong?” Harry has been watching us. He is standing too close to me.

I would keep this from him until we had some idea what to do, but he has already realized what’s happening. It’s not hard to see, now that we’re looking – on the countertop, where we put the deliveries, there are two single-serving cereal boxes and an apple. We’re being cut off.

Harry’s eyes follow mine. Then he glares at me, as though I am to blame for this – not just this, but everything. He whirls to take in the whole room, his head jerking toward the door. His movements are too loud, too fast, too big. His body yells.

“Hey! You!”

We all turn to look at The Officer in his chair by the door.

“What time is it?”

The Officer’s sunglasses shift and resettle. His chin has grown a red and grey stubble. He used to shave with a pocket knife, without lotion or cream. He used to be bigger. Now his yellowing, oil-stained cuff hangs loose around his wrist as he drops his hand to his belt.

He says nothing.

Harry steps closer. His voice drops to a low trembling.

“What time is it?”

The Officer sniffs. His lip curls slightly. His hand closes around the watch, and he raises it, face outward, to eye level. Harry steps forward to look. We all lean forward, a tidal slide, until we can see it, cracked and scuffed, the second hand jerking ineffectually.

4:06:32. 4:06:32. 4:06:32. 4:06:32. 4:06:32.

Somewhere in me, a desiccated voice of reason says it doesn’t matter that time has stopped. We can just wind it again, and start a new 18 hours. Eighteen hours light, six dark. We can flip the light switch right now, take turns counting out the hours minute by minute. We can fix this.  

But The Officer is control. The Officer is knowable. The Officer is order. There must be rules, even when we know we made them up. There has to be something to stand on.

I watch the second hand tic until my vision blurs. I’m sinking, I think, but I haven’t moved. I think the framework of toothpicks that has held me on my feet since my arrival has just been smashed with a whisper of real absurdity, and I’m afraid to move.  

On my right, Harry has sunk into a runner’s crouch, his teeth bared.

The Officer rises partway out of his chair. The air draws tight. Even The Baby lies tense and motionless in psychokitten’s arms, her eyes wide.  

“I was here first,” The Officer says.

His words rust in the air.

I hear Cambridge scuffle to his feet behind me. That gurgling—that’s Begonia chuckling, forcing air through the ancient phlegm in her throat.

“I know what you think,” The Officer turns to each of us. He nods at The Baby. “You think they’ll let her out. You think she deserves to go.”

psychokitten curls herself around The Baby. Her body seems to gain mass.

“No one leaves before me. I was first.” His tone is even and unhurried.

Marco moves a few steps toward The Officer. “Now, think for a moment. We have no control here. Who we think should go – that makes no difference. We all should go. But we all are here. What makes a difference is that we are kept alive, and it seems we are only to be kept alive if we sometime turn out the lights.”

“If they wanted us dead, we’d be dead,” The Officer says. “I’m forcing their hand. I’m not going to let them sneak her out of here in the dark of night. Not without me. They have to show themselves eventually, or she’ll die. We’ll all die.”

Marco begins to respond, but I can’t hear. Someone is screaming.

Where The Officer was, there are more bodies, bodies making noises that bodies shouldn’t make, thuds and cracks – there are too many fists to count, too many clawed fingers. Cambridge is on the ground.

I see a flash of light and beasts with teeth, grappling, combusting – who lit the fire? Who had things to burn?

I should move quickly when there’s a fire. Stop, drop and roll. We all know that. My feet drag me along to the cupboard, where I pull the door partly closed. This isn’t a safe place at all.

I peer through the crack of the door, and through the smoke I count all the people in the world.

Begonia cackles, her palms upturned, her hem flaming.

I count again.

Harry cries out. The Officer’s fist flashes metal.

They must be hidden in the black clouds, huddled under a chair.

I count a third time. My eyes sting. My lungs ache. The numbers go singsong in my head, a learning melody: me, two-oo, three … four, fi-iive, six …

Six.

psychokitten and The Baby are gone.

The Waiting Room - Part 1

The Waiting Room

By Marleah Blades

I was pregnant when I got here, so I have always been Mother.

***

The room smells of old coffee and latex. I reclined across the end table to push – hard plastic chairs bolted down; there was no other way to lean back, and I would not lay on the floor.

The Baby nearly fell through Marco’s hands, but he channeled her into the yellow seat, her body slipping like a melting ice cube around a shallow bowl.

When he handed her to me, I held her to my cheek, dizzy with adrenaline, too fast too slow, my head a cotton beehive.

I whispered to her: “There are seven people in the world. You’re eight.”

Then I apologized until they took her from me and I fainted.

***

Begonia donated her hand towel to wrap The Baby up in. Begonia has lost the hat that gave her her name – a bedraggled blue straw hat with artificial flowers pinned around the brim. We don’t know how things get lost in here.

I thought once The Baby was born I might be called out. We keep saying the metaphor rules the world. Once we’re done waiting, we’ll get called out.

I’ve never seen anyone called out, though.

***

Marco tosses a dime-store rubber ball against the wall and catches it mid-bounce. I sit down next to him. He bounces the ball off the wall to me and I bounce it back.

Again.

Again.

One time we did 316 bounces without missing.

“What are you waiting for, Mother?”

We ask in case the answer has changed. We ask, often. When Marco asks, it’s always like this, thoughtful, with a gentle voice like a therapist’s -- as though if we talk through it we’ll conquer it, a timer will go off, and someone will open the door and tell us all to go home.

What are you waiting for?

The ball hits an empty box, shoots high and fast into the corner, and ricochets off the leg of a chair with a hollow clang. We watch it roll to a stop against psychokitten’s boot. She raises her eyebrows at us, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, shushing gently into The Baby’s ear.

I scoot forward two feet to retrieve the ball. “I’m waiting for you to learn some goddamned aim.”

Again.

***

The Baby coos and gurgles, as I imagine other babies do. She has watery, round eyes.

“Is this normal?” I asked Begonia the first time The Baby pooped. Not knowing what to do, I had wrapped her bottom in toilet paper that was now a soggy mess inside her towel. “Is it supposed to look like that?” Begonia smiled and said nothing. I realized then we don’t know if Begonia has children.

Marco grinned as he leaned in to look. “It’s fine. She is just fine.”

Then he picked up the washcloths that arrived that morning and fashioned one into a diaper, showing me step by step how to fold it.

In the black corner, Cambridge struck a match to burn the day’s refuse. The smoke snaked along the floor to the door, meandering around the hinges before exiting through some miniscule opening -- leaving, as though that were nothing.

This room must smell putrid, I thought. But, you know, you have to leave a room sometimes and come back in to know how foul it is. The Baby must not notice it. How could she? She doesn’t know any better.

“When do the human parts of a person start growing, Marco? When does she turn into someone who is, instead of something that wants?”

Marco’s dark eyes regarded me softly. “She already is, Mother. She is someone.”

The Baby grunted and rooted against me like a pink piglet.

“No she isn’t.”                                                                

He didn’t reply. I wanted to ask, Will she, though? Will she become a real person if we stay here? How can she learn living from us, when none of us is doing it? But I didn’t ask. What kinds of questions are those?

“You don’t have kids, right?” I asked.

“Nieces,” he replied. “From 11 years old I was helping my sister raise her daughters.”

“How old are they now?”

He folded another diaper. “Oh, sixteen. Fourteen. Twenty. There. See how? Now you do it.”

He took The Baby while I unfolded and folded diaper cloths at his instruction. He bounced her gently, making faces the way people do with babies.

“I’m too old to have a baby,” I said. “You’re not supposed to have babies after 35, are you?”

“Bah.” He didn’t look up. “That’s only for the pregnancy risk. You already had her. You had her with no medication and no sterile equipment on a chair in a room that doesn’t exist.” He made another face before handing her back. “She’s just fine.”

***

We wake up in this room. That’s how we arrive. There are no windows, but there is a door. The Officer stays by the door. Every morning he turns on the lights and we find someone or something new. Towels. Toilet paper. There’s a cupboard and a toilet and a sink.

When I got here, the cupboard stayed stocked with food. Then Harry started leaving the cupboard door open at all hours, trying to figure out how it was being replenished.

“He acts like nobody’s ever tried this before,” Cambridge snorted over the splintered bang of Harry’s fist on the back of the cupboard. He laughed as the boy raised himself onto the countertop on one bony knee so he could peer over the top shelf.

“You think you’re the first one to think of this?” Cambridge barked. “You think we’ve been sitting on our hands all this time?”

They quickly became a two-man drama; we sat back against the far wall to watch while Cambridge paced and turned his palms up at us, and for a moment I felt like my six-year-old self sitting cross-legged on the shag carpet watching Randy Savage whip up an arena against The Million Dollar Man.

Harry slid off the counter, squaring himself to examine it. His lips twisted, opened and shut, then fluttered into mumbling as he returned to shifting boxes and cans from side to side on the shelves.

“Hey. Kid.” Cambridge cocked his head, pursed his lips. Raised and dropped one hand in tired sympathy. “We’ve done this. I’ve done it all, man. We tried to follow the plumbing lines. We tried to follow the air. You’re wasting your time.”

Harry stopped, one hand raised at the cupboard door, frozen in mid-reach. Our hearts slowed. The room fell stagnant.

“Well, that’s it, then,” Begonia announced, casually unconcerned, her voice a brick thrown through our silence. She rubbed her hands and pushed herself to standing.

Then with a crash, the cupboard seemed to explode. Cracker boxes, MREs, energy bars, all hurled into the air. Begonia squealed as one of Harry’s projectiles hit her shoulder. We scattered to the corners of the room to dodge his rain of fury, covering our heads, hoping the cans were too heavy to reach us.

Cambridge strode to the cupboard – two steps. He shoved Harry away from the nearly empty cupboard and slammed the door shut.

Harry glared at him, nostrils flaring, and flung it open again.

We watched. Their chests heaved.

Then Cambridge stiffened and whirled away – there’s no room to storm off. All our body language has been adjusted for space. We’ve traded expansive gestures for emotional seizures. Move from the elbow, arms to your sides.

Harry wouldn’t let anyone close the cupboard door. The food stock diminished. Once the cupboard was empty, we had to wait for food like everything else.

Continue to Part 2

Mornings Are For Rising

If the shadows of the morning press the air out of your lungs,

Beloved,

Raise your arms and call it an embrace.

If it stops your heart to see the pair of shoes there by the door,

Beloved,

Cross and flex your toes beneath the sheet.

See? They’re still there. You can fill those shoes.

If lists of doubts and losses line the space behind your eyes,

Beloved,

Open them, and hold your hands up high--

Those beautiful strong hands of yours that move without you thinking;

Watch your fingers bending one by one.

You’re doing that, beloved. That’s you.

Daybreak isn’t always pretty.

Don’t pretend it is.

But mornings are for rising.

Rise, beloved.

VIDEO - Kick

Thanks as always to Alpha Psi and Cocky Guerilla Theater for giving a platform to so many diverse voices and performers, and thanks to Lindsey (Bang Bang) Cannon for recording me. I was grateful to read this piece last night!

You can find the poem here.

Dematerialized

This post means nothing.
We are legion, true yet false,
muzzled by our flesh.

Day 30: Advice That’s All Too Easy to Ignore

If you struggle to love her, write her down.

You can’t look that closely without a little love.

If you struggle with how much you love her, put the pen away.

Because once you’ve carved her presence into words,

outlined the curve of her knuckles on the chair,

and named the peculiar pressure of her laugh;

once you’ve ransacked every simile you know

to find the one that suits her eyes precisely…

well, you’re done for then.

For the Graduates

It’s graduation day in my town. Several of our local college graduates are friends of mine, people whose smiles and drive and energy and stellar child-whispering abilities have made my life better, in big and small ways. I want the world to see how f&^%ing remarkable they are, and I want them to see it, too, when the world doesn’t.

I guess that’s why I feel compelled to share this list today. It’s torn and limp from being folded and unfolded. I call it my imperatives list. These are things I’ve learned the hard way, and they were worth it. I still fail at them every day. I still add things. I keep this page with me all the time.

I know my list can’t carry a lot of weight – advice like this is better learned than taught, and that’s how it should be. If you take nothing else from it, take from it the value of knowing what you stand for and who you are deciding to be, because that is -- it absolutely is -- a decision, and it’s a decision you will have to make again and again. Make a list of your own, and then when my kids graduate college, you can share yours with me.  

   

When in doubt, make the harder choice.

No one can decide right or wrong for you. Their rights and wrongs aren’t yours anyway, so it wouldn’t be much use.

Strength is not an inherent trait. It’s a decision you make, always. Make it.

Fear no one. No other human being has a damn bit more value than you do, and no one has true authority over you either. When you approach others with fear, you don’t get to experience one another, and that’s tragic. When you approach others with fear, you don’t challenge yourself or allow yourself to challenge them. No one learns anything, and no one moves forward. Fear is bad for everyone.  

Question everything.

Take action, even when you’re not sure. You’re never going to be sure. Thinking without deciding will paralyze you.

You are responsible for your decisions. Respect other people enough to refuse to take responsibility for theirs.

Be private if you want to, but do not take part in secrets. Secrets are damages unrealized.

If you find yourself apologizing for the same thing over and over, either stop doing the thing, or own it and quit apologizing. Otherwise your sorry only means “I’m too lazy to change” or “I’m too scared to commit.”

True, deep connection with others is a sacred thing. Don’t neglect it.

Only the radical deserves your time. Whatever you choose to do, do it radically.

  

That’s it, kids. Congratulations. Go party. Go unleash your homemade havocs on whatever world you discover.

Day 28: Demolition Waltz

The turn, the swing, the hammer

thump              hiss                  crash

The savage, welcome clamor

grind                clang               smash

The boot, the door, the splinter

bang                grunt                crack

The wild rebuke of winter

roar                 whirl                smack

No growth without revision

groan               bend                grasp

No stitch without incision

cry                   drip                  gasp

One final shove, it tumbles

boom               howl                clap

                                        The newness roils and rumbles.

Day 27: Scarcity

The water taught the leaves to swim this morning,

giggling “come along”; they tumbled on to neverending.

The thrasher blew its imitation kisses from the fencepost

while the cat stretched out her paws to catch them crosshatched in the sun.

The living green shone riotous, daring me to count its shades,

then twisting with a wink to show the myriad it hid.

I stepped outside to write some verse on scarcity,

but the trees laughed, donning their infinite robes.

Day 26: From the Front Steps

Petals on the walk.

Kitty’s getting married again.

Small hands wet with captured bubbles

line with fur each time she tries to jilt the teddy bear.

They don’t know Here Comes the Bride.

Kitty takes the aisle to Inspector Gadget’s song:

doop doodoop doodoop...

Four half-finished books nap spreadeagle on the porch.

Lazy pages flutter in the musical hush,

the exhalation of the trees.

The sunlight treads its patient progress through the ladybug gardens.

Day 25: The Ghost

This morning I’m bedeviled

by a ghost, its heart disheveled,

and its face a darkened mirror

in which I do not appear.

Its presence grips and rends me

and its empty glass upends me.

Only monsters lack reflections;

am I that? Am I not here?

It sings a plea for kindness

-- ever blind to its own blindness;

while I beg for its departure,

it pretends it cannot hear.

In vain I’ve tried to cease it,

and in vain tried to release it,

crying, Please don’t make me face

that glass so empty and so clear!

From a distance I could ache for--

oh, my heart could even break for—

this poor specter so unfairly bound,

so wracked with grief and fear…

Yet this ghost returns to find me,

and with adamance remind me

it won’t let me redefine me

when it hovers ever near.

Though my eyes are red with weeping

ghostly mercy must be sleeping;

No – I see on closer study

neither eye, nor mouth, nor ear.

And how strange to now perceive it--

I can barely yet believe it--

underneath that horrid mirror

is a face I still hold dear.

Day 23: Haiku

You’re never finished.

There are still so many things

to rediscover.

Day 22: #youarereal

  

You   have   a   body

carbon matter occupying space

you have a brain

fed by pulsing blood

you’re full of filters,

engines, valves;

you take in and put out.

Your skin still sparks,

I’d bet,

you drink your coffee,

hiccup unexpectedly;

you trip, you stub your toe;

you have mass,

solid, liquid

you are real.

you have a pair of grasping hands

whose fingers open

gateways into worlds

devoid of matter

in which

no one is

accountable

where all of us

are avatars

that keep what we let go

that live the lives we lie about 

whose hashtags tell

the best-intentioned fictions

yet

you     have     a     body.

#youarereal

No.

You are real.

Be that.

Day 21: Our Words, Our Bright Balloons

There’s nothing new to say.

            Our words, our bright balloons,

            they    bob       and      hop

            content to be confined

and understood.

All we know is infinite ::: repeat.

            These strings, these greens and blues

in just this order,

this same knot

to ground them.

How                to                     our                   are

            absurd             think                lives                 new.

How                to                     our                   unique.

            absurd             think                words

So let’s poesy (like prophesy but wordful)

            let’s twist and squeeze

our emphases

remold the lexis

undefine

Let’s anything but not say nothing news.      

Let’s blossom out our fingers

and goodbye kiss our bright balloons

to unexpected treetops

out of place

So at another time

some-unspecial-one will spy them

            fish-flap-flapping in the branches

            in a moment – any moment

and hmmmm a thought, cut loose by accident.

How beautifully absurd.

Day 20: To the Ocean

She watches

Google maps, she

eyes the gas gauge.

She pictures them

along the highway

stranded with

the luggage.

He finds the

local NPR again.

He knows there

are no exits

after Freeman,

not for miles.

It slips below

the quarter mark.

“Remember when”

he says --

she stares

into the dashboard, 

lips tight, 

gritting --

“we’d listen

every Sunday

to this show?

We’d drive

the afternoons

and laugh.”

His watch has

left a line

around his

wrist from all

the sun. The

yard is lovely

in the spring.

She pictures

them along the

highway, stranded.

They did laugh,

didn't they?

The sky expands

as they near

the ocean.

Day 19: Haiku

One thing that is not

Confusing or upsetting:

Baby panda bears.

Day 18: On Platitudes

I get it. It helps some days.

It helps to glance through Instagram

to find that chick whose profile pic

is her off in a field somewhere,

the sunbeams shining halos round her head.

You find a meme that tells you what

you think you need to hear;

1000 pixels square, max 10-word therapy.

You focus on your chakras

and then move on with your day

a little stronger:

You can handle this.

The day moves.

I get it. It helps some days.

But what about the days that do not move,

when time keeps stacking higher on your head?

When you’re the beaten beggar

too exhausted or ashamed to turn your eyes

out of the gutter,

and someone walking by without a glance

throws some cheap hope

-- forgotten pennies –

in your cup …

it’s not enough to buy another coffee.

Go and tell the hopeless to “choose happy”

when what they want and do not want stand face to face in mirrors

and yes and no are lovers, coupling everywhere.

Go and tell the grieving “just let go”

when each new trill of birdsong drives them wet-eyed to the graveyard.

Try to tell me nothing is “im-possible”

when lying is unlivable but truth points sharp at someone else’s throat.

Inspiration offered blindly lands just like a club.

Use it carefully.

Watch for the beggars.

Day 17: Panic

Panic walks through the dust

barefoot in white linen,

pulling you behind it on

a dirty sheet. The sheet

winds around your ankle

rattling its silent tail.

Panic hauls hard as gravity

upon the rope

that anchors you

to both the ground and sky.

It pulls

as though you are a bell

booming from a tower made of

toothpicks.

Inside the bell is

a smaller bell,

and a smaller,

until finally a chime

with one tube missing,

which barely rings

don’t give up.

if you give up today yesterday won’t count

and you were never

real

don't give up.

And sometimes you hear it

And sometimes you don’t.

Day 16: Snapshots

Crepe myrtle, barren, bows above, its spindled fingers spread.

The banjo birds are singing.

One row ahead

A back tied in black lace recalls

An azure flower scarred into a shoulder

Striking vivid lines in cotton webs.

All things are made of other things

All memories cobbled moments.

I'd like to lie in the grass and look.

Each iris is a mountainous new world

Each pupil is the tiny void it orbits.

And no one floats away.

Stone and wood and family

Make place.

Day 15: I tried to write the villanelle again.

I tried to write the villanelle again.

My verses got all tangled in your hair.

I have no power over this damn’d pen.

I found a rhyme to use just now but then

I thought I heard your footfall on the stair.

I tried to write the villanelle again.

This line, I thought, would preach of gods and men,                            

Except – I’m sorry, what’s that scent you wear?

I have no power over this damn’d pen.

I breathe more deeply, try to find my zen …

My thoughts keep snaking back into your snare.

I tried to write the villanelle again.

These hands rebel; they reminisce of when

Your tender lips first came into their care.

I have no power over this damn’d pen.

I thought that it was finished, cried Amen!

Alas, another interrupted prayer.

I tried to write the villanelle again.

I have no power over this damn’d pen.

Day 14: If I have to choose a silence

If I have to choose a silence

it will not be

earphones

secretly unplugged,

pale, straight lips,

a shoulder,

or a lock of hair.

It will not be the

liquid sheen of moonlight or

a deep-woods midnight crouch;

it will not be binoculars

or stacks of books

or holy candles.

If I have to choose a silence

it will be

a highway underpass

that’s charging through a rainstorm.

Here

.

.

.

then gone.

Day 13: Advice to Me and You on Days Not Like Today

Lean forward.

Everything else does.

Those barbs will tear you up

if you keep trying to pull them out.

Paint the ends instead,

a yellow smiley face on one,

a fist raised up

a cross-eyed dog –

That’s funny, right?

It hurts less when you’re laughing,

assface.

See? I know what I’m doing.

Paint the line with rainbows

and just follow them,

’cause flopping like an angry fish

ain’t doing you no favors.

Stop saying grief.

Call it something noble; call it yours.

Make it sweet and melancholy,

own it like a Sunday sacrifice.

You thought that it would set you loose in time.

It won’t, if you still love a part of it.

Don’t give that up, though.

Just lean forward.

Day 12: Excavation

Are you

brave enough

to be discovered?

I promise I’ll be gentle –

as gentle as one can be

while one excavates a soul.

I’ll pull the scales loose

lovingly.

It will be more

undressing

than dissection. I’m

good at that.

You’ll tell me you read children’s books—

not with your radiant bundle giggling on your lap

but late, alone by lamplight

in a room painted with shadows, where

you always realize halfway through the book that

you’re the child,

and you cry, uncertain

whether you are sad

or deeply grateful.

I’ll tell you about the night

I polished off the homemade hooch

at an apartment party, and a

doped-up rennie grabbed my hand

and looked into my eyes

to tell me “Daddy’s sorry,”

which had no meaning for me, but

was magic in the sense

that he believed it

so I smiled and let a tear

roll down my face.

I’ll always ask you why.

And when things get

too quiet

I will wait.

You have to want

to be seen.

When I find you

it will hurt

the way that grieving does,

the way it hurts to notice

that your skin has gotten loose

and bunchy at the joints.

But that will fade

because you’ll know

someone was looking for you,

begging you to want

to be discovered.

I’ll tell you that you’re beautiful,

and you in turn

can tell me if my

truths are truths,

and if you can forgive me

for discovering.

Day 11: The Vultures

the vultures watch imaginary figures intersect

from chairback perch

the ornamental iron clicks and groans

with clasp-unclasping

<< husssshhhh >>

the vultures watch imaginary fires run

their flaming tongues from ankles north

to prickling burn retreat

their eyes the deep reflective black

of every screen gone dead

<< shhhhhhh >>

they snap their terse wet beaks

and wings tar-paper rasp & tremble

whispering imaginary endings
impatient for a fresh

catastrophe

Day 10: Untitled

Drop me at the rusted railroad track.

Point me to the woods.

Tell me where the floorboards rotted through

Ten years ago.

Don’t come.

I need to turn around alone

And open up my eyes to what

No other eyes have opened on before.

Give me my camera and set me free.

I need to see a miracle today.

Day 9: The ways I want

Like a petulant child.

Like a titan, hips commanding slaves.

Like a scientist unsatisfied with watching stars a universe away.

Like one two three just be, just be here.

Like a vine sharp with thorns.

Like an alley bitch slinking toward an offering, eyes fixed on the uncertain face.

Like a surgeon dissecting mysteries.

Like leaves newly fallen from the tree. 

Day 8: Clarity

Driving down a county route whose name is spelled two ways,

 I glance off to the left      just     as

the morning sunshine  s c a t t e r s 

into beams         between          the  pines,

     and   I   can

           see

      the   air

--a vision I am sure is not allowed.

   It twinkles soft and smooth

 light as a honeycomb

here-not-here

    the breathable air

     gilded, taking space

  rushing past and

gone.

I will never see that miniscule eternity again.

Why am I laughing?

Day 7: Sonnet

No line of verse is writ by me unless

Th’ elixir of the morning sets my pace.    

Espresso’s riotous rhythms onward press,

And open up the veins of inward space.

By evening, coffee’s hot duress expires;

And wine lends inspiration to my wit,

Emboldens me with strangers, loves, and liars,

Untethers from my mind all counterfeit.

Both drafts together churn my guts with rage.

I fear my crumbling body soon must choose--

Unhappiest decision of cruel age--

Which vital pump to coddle, which abuse …

Let’s toast, with Kaldi’s brew and Bacchus’ art,

this war between my liver and my heart!

Day 6: The Other Side of Yes

Your right decision landed like a shipwreck.

Words draped

breathless

on the rocks,

  their beggar’s ribs protruding,

and

  your body doubled over

             with the shock

                    of new integrity.

Still, when you had finished it

            you   thrummed

the way you always do

   when     dissonance

            resolves.

The right owe no apologies,

and yet

 in grace you planted

fragrant gardens

   for remembrance.

Here,

 on the other side of yes

  the bells toll

never ceasing

  for the lost.

But now and then

            we raise our heads

and catch the smell of

   flowers

 on the air.

Day 5: Once I Was the Springtime

Once, I was the springtime.

All the new green things carried my name

and hope like pollen scattered wide,

prolific and disastrous.

This parlance of new life

is not for me. I know that now:

my ciphers all reformed and redefined,

my totem, too, co-opted,

and I, my Self, erased from them,

and I, my Self, re-forming.

I train my ear once more to learn

the language of the season:

the raucousness of plunging birds,

the water’s deaf’ning march,

the bees whose drone en masse  

has quickened in the holly.

Perhaps at length I might reclaim as well

spring’s emerald silence.

For now I choose the louder dialects:

the clack of horns, the roaring of the bear.

Day 4: Unraveled

I saw a snake bisected

by a garden hoe,

the edge too dull to cut,

so blow by blow the thing

unraveled

not like skin should do

or scales

but cords and sinews

one by one

recoiling

to pop loose.

Bloated on the garage shelf

it posed a risk.

The baby birds were gone

already.

And our dog was there …

Blow by blow its head

whipped back,

it tail tight formed

into a squeezing coil

to seize from us

our weapon

or to stop it,

pleading body-full --

what god does a snake

cry out to?

No one thought it Wrong,

that slaughter.

It was Right.

Protect your own.

I cried and cried.

The coil of its fear

wound tight

around my wrongness.

One year later

when we moved,

I scrubbed with bleach

but never got the bloodstain off the floor.