3 / Thirteen

Time spins, the clock marches forward, the chimes still me on the fateful road.  The thin, supple golden second hand digs itself into the dirt, inching along each beat of the equation as it adds to itself, additional millions as I step down the street- the sky not pitch black anymore, me not speeding as I have done, simply to realize that I wanted only to get home faster so that I would see you again sooner.  Nothing has changed; only I have. But time has not.

Time outside the place runs just fine.  Drops of rain play inside a well in the murder ballads always finding tune in my often dreadful imagination.  The rituals of morning, evening, sharing with others and sharing alone hold themselves to me, and we walk like that, together in the light.  I love it when the sun shines so brightly, smacking me in the face with its heat so much that, though I cannot see them, I can feel the rays boring through my pupils, my chestnut vision alight with sunshine, yellow seeing right through me.  As I see right through them.  This open plain of sight leading me into its folds.

I live much of my daily life in a golden field.  Streetcorners, hobnobs, kissing a big bunch of fools, and wanting something more...all leave me in this field.  There may be a church nearby -- old, Roman, Byzantine, one of those ancient things that brands me, laughs at me trying to make my way among these moderns, with their minimalist problems, tireless complaints and disconnect from their lives.  I am connected with every noise performing tricks on me, the last one taking me back on the childhood highway near the woods, where the bodies usually are dumped.  I am connected with the slight scent of a man, who doesn’t know I can with scent know everything that he is, moving in and out of frame, with an overly made up woman in a wig, standing nearby him, she who sees me looking right at her as I do.  I am connected when the neighbor’s cat has a seizure, and my heart stops and hands shake until he is recovered, further connecting me to the my mother’s fifteen minutes like that, waiting for the ambulance to arrive when my father was called from the scene on the first day of Spring, nearly five years ago.  Time spins for sure.

Most probably the sorest thought back then in those days, when I was living and breathing through memory alone from the bed of an emotional invalid whose tongue made me happy, along with the vacant want in his brown eyes, which I took for love and a few other things, was that time would never allow me to have my father back.  There seemed logically like there had to be a time at which point <this> would be done with, and he could continue things, perhaps not as they were, but in a new form.  But that time still hasn’t come.  And though I have accepted that tenfold, and try to resurrect myself to him with every dreaming night, with every good intention I keep to myself, with every romantic notion that isn’t clouded by bitterness or regret, with the stubborn belief that I am doing right if I am living true, I still occasionally think for a forgetful moment that he will be here someday, in some form, to see the beautiful place which I have created, the good way I have taken care of things for her (so far), the people I call my family who he would surely enjoy long talks over wine with, the streets and foghorns calling me home every night and how they might remind him of his home.  The soreness of all that just lives deeper from the surface -- not hidden, not pushed under the rug, but just lovingly folded in with the tenuous layers of my life since.  I cannot imagine that fifteen minutes of his shell drifting from her right there as she watched and could do nothing.

I hope she knows that I will never take that from her, or ask her about it.  The stopwatch clicks its heels shut at me every morning at nine and starts back up again every evening about 5:30.  Time does not exist in these hours, and I do not exist much off of the page either.  I want no harm done to anyone; I want no explanations, or growth, or revenge.  I simply want to get back that mass of lost time, when the ticking is silenced, my breathing ceased, my seizure underway.  I am tired of foaming at the mouth every time I feel something inside those walls, that I want to feel outside . . .in that gentle sun burning a hole through my eyes’ experience of it, in that field I walk through in my dreams at dusk, living out the sensations of existences being lived, extinguished and rebirthed - implanting itself together in a kind of supernova of ultimate being.  Where one life does not sting and bleed through another’s action without the inaction of an often unspoken of, third party.  Someone is always pulling the strings, and inaction left to its own devices only leads to circumstance becoming its god.

In the first few seconds of my life when the jumper cables awake it again in the evening time, I vow not to go that way.  Whatever a vow may mean these days- when everything has the option of renewal in its palms.  This has been a hard way to live . . . I know Da wouldn’t have liked it.  He wanted to help me reach that other life; the one of my choosing, of my creating, of worth because I was worthy of it.  I think he knows there are quite a few ways out, and the bases are covered, as they say.  A crack to the timepiece, smothering the foxhole of moments gone and come and here now, always Here Now, shatters and sinks hard into the fencework around my heart, only to realize that blood letting is sometimes the only way to heal up and feed the fire in our belly.

The fire has a great danger of going out, and freedom when not used is the exact same way.  We must be on guard.  We must be vigilant, if only to allow ourselves to keep that liberty, the sort I see spinning like a top in her eyes with such ease of access, as she turnes upward and glances fixted on a curving swoopful of birds descending / ascending.  Truth is, every moment of my life outside of the place I don’t think of the place- of its inhabitants, of its details, of its supposed rules or what it takes, what it is.  It likes to think it is bigger than all of its contents, but as to it and as to them and the whole of its bland and complacent DNA, the only thing I find there which I ever think about when not there, is you.  I wish you could see me when the clock starts up again- every dusk in the field, every night’s dreaming, every morning and day away, as myself. Smiling, supple, soft in the ways of the world flanked by armies of angels at my side.  Crowing their dissatisfaction, the birds in the hourglass toss themselves to and fro, and I’ve a night of life and a morning to fully comprehend, before I shut it all off again and sigh, rumbling and grinding to a halt, as the elevator doors open and I feel it passing from my body, left just visible in the inner recessed of my eyes, where it stays sleeping for the day unless you look in the right place, and I give one more day to the remaining sacrifice I must have some reason to fulfill. 

M. Lucia