Becoming
Today a large oil field found in North Sea, today a kidnapped German found dead, today shares plunge after wall street crash, today British aid worker kidnapped in Iraq, today metal fatigue caused comet crashes, today US scientist charged with spying, today “Balloon family” ready for arrest..
Today, only me. Finally, my insides are showing and I’m sick. How amateur of me, thinking how long I can tuck this infection in – inward, inward. Now everywhere. Bedridden, blanket-thrashing tissue disposing can’t-keep-anything-down grabmeorIwillflyawaywithmyhotairballoonhead sick. Listening to the world from afar on my silver statical radio, turning on unjust movies via 1920s and hitting MUTE, turning away and staring at the cottage cheese ceiling all day – daydreaming.
I’m in Brittany, etymologist extraordinaire – historian, conveniently amish. I’m underwater off the coast of Laconia, a scuba diver searching for a lost world, submerged entirely, never coming up empty handed, my children trailing like little fishes behind me. I’m a pianist in 1939 if anyone asks, but a spy for Britain playing at a German dinner, both parents Jews. I’m in Macau China, home of the toy industries, in my mother’s arms running from a government that wants to replace me with my unborn brother. I’m a plane crash survivor made up of plastic limbs and donor organs, the only thing that’s mine is my memory, a robot by default. I’m a fencer in Edinburgh, Scotland, I have a wrist as swift as a fox and feet as fleeting as my heart. I’m a doctor in 1919 and have won the Nobel Prize for Medicine, an injured miner from Cornwall comes into my building hysterical, too poor for help. I’m an extra on set of an experimental film by Alice Guy, it was the coming of women in the film industry but not the ballot….
I am sinking into a couch that’s not mine, nauseated by tonic, a cat scratching my throat, exhausted but kept awake, heavy eyed, and no hiding here. Though not severe, but what feelings I’ve kept inside are taking a toll on my body, pouring outwards. And I am left wondering, behind my eyelids
Who will I be next?
I have been all of these things and more,
yet with some sadness in the wonder that it happened while I wasn’t looking.
So I have been young and I have been old…
Breadth
A closeness
interrupted
Two clock loops
The signal given, the bullet straight to Cupid and ricocheted.
Yes, I have won many battles, but have killed many men
only to gain the routine of precipitation.
I will keep the memory of these fallen bodies in the manner of El dia de los Muertos
and hold your head, not as I hold my head, but as animals do with their young. If I could, I would pick you up by the fold of your neck and carry you with my teeth. I have marked you before, no sense in pretending to love you calmly now; I cannot love you the way that I want. But I cannot care for you as a child, for I am like a child some days
realizing throwing water balloons at you won’t always make you look at me. Yet, I feel I have
birthed you; you’ve birthed me. Loving me like so, you’ve taken me in your arms, have fed me and always do I reach for you in the end as trees extend their branches, stretching their trunks, lunging every which way. But are these gestures too small and far to notice – you look away, hesitate. From skin to skin, I have come out from under you. Blood sharing, bone pressing love, and I have fractured you upcoming while you cradle your womb. Forgive me,
I do not mean to make you bleed pushing for life.
Love, all alike…
“Never.
For it seems to me that any hope in life is such a shout; a voice that answers the silent place of despair. It is silence that most needs an answering – when I can no longer speak, hear me.”
Night swells. Widowed with strings of your hair weaved into threads of my shirt.
With the curves of your chest, the cups of your palms. The lightness of your bare feet;
I have nested in you and have made you an everywhere.
Even still, as gray as sleep is dozing into dreams, but yet
by warmth – colored by music, I lay with half of you
in drawn out breaths, I inhale you
and exhale me.
Where have you begun; what five arrowed instruments play in sync
with the rhythm of my heart
Beat-
I struggle to bend from parallel
to an arched back, looped around your
arms
dangling high, as if to kiss God’s feet
Trying,
what others are born with, trying
Waiting to breath.
