You will be presented, as an even trade,
Childhood, for a free fall to the open grave
You will have the choice, when presented,
To be afraid
To be wary at your post
To be a-quiverin’ in yer boots.
Soldier.
It’s time, you’re a hospice nurse,
Angelica.
You’re a shining star, that’s what you’re worth.
“Goodbye, twenty-five!”
Said Monica Ryan, she aged 25.364 years. The infection started in her eyes.
May she rest; in piece.
And you would like to hear a story, ay?
A turn-o-tale for the tactless fancies
Of the fisherman’s glitter scales, be gay
and do crimes –
The types of stories that I’d bear
If you with only half a heart to care
And half a mind to listen, for the lost
And weary travelers of life’s ambitious way
Take a cold one for the road and stay home, love,
To Read Today
~ a paperless series of short stories, by lorraine the wrighter, beginning for you here, Monday.
I am asked to describe it. Not by someone, by a book I picked up to tell me what to do. Something needs to do that. Always. That’s what it feels like.
Someone has to tell me what to do with my face. Always. It will lead to that.
It will.
My eyes are watering and I can not see, there’s been this very persistent pounding in my heart, my hands. My head. I took some pills to fall asleep. Why isn’t anyone attracted to me? I’m drowsy and falling asleep in my bed, isn’t there someone who wants to hold my heart? I know that I’m a little ugly. But it’s coyote season baby, learn to take a joke. I would water your garden; I would hold your hand; we are what we hold between us, are the storm, the rack.
Wait a minute longer, I’ll be a simple songbird, I’ll sing a song of sixpence, you can bake me in your pie.
Wait a minute not too long, I’ll still be singing my sweet song when you peek inside the oven and I’ve yet to die.
Wait a minute longer, my song is growing stronger, you know the oven’s taken me and you just want your pie.
How’s that songbird singing with a voice made of pie filling? How’s that little bird gonna crow, gonna crow?
My body is a dead bird but my song will never die.
I’m an old speckled hen, two Irish mules, and a whole pint deep in oktober’s brassy music and I’m feeling not weepy like pathos, like writing in two notebooks and guessing at love languages. In other words, I’m drunk. Pretending to be a writer, that’s what I am. Reading about physics like I have any exposure. Rotating in a barstool like I won’t have to expel myself at some point. Throbbing. I’m alive, alive, a-looking at my reflection, I need to feed my dogs but I’m drunk. The fog clears, o am I drunk or stuck here, I’ll come back after I feed them, just let me sober up and I’ll be back with my bumper stickers and tattoos, you are a faceful of heartbeats and I make the pain go away only by looking at you. I yelled your name drunk from my floor like I haven’t done myself in for the addictions of the mind, you’re on mine, wander in, I swear you’ll look dashing, you’ll be mine, we’ll dance, hold hands, look into each other’s faces. I trust you, I do, I can’t tell why except that I trust you. I woke up faster I’d died and gave you a flower for the pain you feel without any pleasure, we have all in equal measure, it’s the tuning and the rhythm that make it all. The straw misses my face and I have to find a stall in this stream or I’m bound to burst. I’ll go home when I’m ready, come back for the first of all pleasures, the human in us. Mind over matter is an element of trust.
Dreamer, five off the crystal river,
Dance, and you’re a diamond sky
Hasten for the boat, we move as one
Cough, lean beam, square shoulders
Nerve tension, rest in the unison of
The universe, fried food or kitchens,
Sliver of away, the island is off and
Here comes the catchup, I’ve got
Something to say. End of statement.
Period. Please, pass the Buck and
The skunk. Bear, crows eye hearing,
Dead on a doormat, format makes
No difference to keeper, nothing
Can touch me here. It’s a traffic jam
Because I am flowing, river of life,
Deftly showing. Bling of bride blue
Haze, Finger patterns sought where the
sauce might get you in it. I feel love and a million other things when I dance outside. Seen, sometimes, mostly good.
See me more, I’m listening and probably looking at the ground.
The ground is full of rocks and I am made of soup. What are you?
Leave it there. See yah later.
I’ve turned my shoulder to the wind, but there is no end to the old road I was on. I can’t un-walk the miles, I can’t take back the time. I can only carry on. That’s the danger of colliding with other people. Not the collateral damage you do to each other, or the ache in your fingers for theirs.
The distance between your lunch dates may span lifetimes and lightyears, but you’ll always find each other in your most mundane dreams, pretending not to see each other from the corners of third eyes.
You may turn your back, gather your sacred things, leave each other out of conversations, but when you get a ringing in your ear, you’ll know it’s them. When you think of them staring out your kitchen window at golden hour, you’re doing dishes in each other’s imaginations, you’re inhabiting the same sphere of unacknowledged spinal column sensations.
Our every entwining is a maybe, a question mark, an uncertainty of anything, a throwing of the ropes to a nor’easter and a hoping for a something. And they never, ever end.
If your heart breaks, so does mine. If my heart beats, does yours? I think so.
“Maybe tomorrow. Maybe the next day.”
Lorraine The Wrighter