Wherein I Murder My Baby

because It’s my 2000th post, & that’s the sort of thing you’re supposed to do…I had something written…something long…I tore it to pieces…& I wrote you a remedy for my quiet:

Some years, your gardens refuse to grow

& a halcyon makes her nest in your heartbeat,
but you can only hear the laugh that salts the sea to lead.
Pebbles crack bones against the shore. Stars turn to dust in the sand.
We carry home corpses to listen to them whisper.

If I whisper, a bough will break;
a crack will become a prayer on the wind.
If I scream, I can shape you the speech of a snowflake
before an aurora strokes the sun green.

In my heartbeat, a grey bird with blue feathers
& a red tongue, whistles & woos the sea
before she swallows it whole.

Some years your gardens refuse to grow.

In which I tell you about my morning

but only briefly because the interwebbyness of space is too full of the things I look at in the office when the boss is busy working

I drove through one of those train stops this morning. You know, where the light flashes are frantic, the steel bars drop like hammers, & the whistle shreds the distance in a blur. I knew I should have stopped, but I drove through anyway. It was never a question of mortality, but maybe it was a leap of faith.

After I drowned my not-quite-near death in coffee, after I piled my cooler with ice to chill soil and muck, I had the pleasure of sampling my first septic tank. I have pictures. I have proof. But you don’t want to see them. Industrial septage comes in colors you wont find in the leaching fields beneath your lawn. Imagine an apple jolly rancher, maybe darker. Imagine an odor like the taste of indigestion and bile. I had the pleasure of sampling my second septic tank immediately following the first. It wasn’t quite as lovely as the sour emerald that came before it.

When I left the site, the Indian, in the Escalade behind me, had a Manjusri bobble-head on his dash. I wondered if he chose the sky-colored gas-guzzler first, or whether it began with the bobble-head; whether he thought that the vehicle, in size, in hunger for ozone, might somehow be similar to the blue lion the bodhisattva was sometimes shown to ride. I do not think his wisdom has yet had time to tame his mind. That might just be me though, or that might just be the fact that he flicked a sacred being at a stop light to watch its head dance.

Today, has been an odd day. Perhaps the white critters, I introduced to the sun when I slid back the stone above the green water, sensed the decay in my skull. Maybe they are making white marks on my grey matter where the process will speed forward to dust.

Maybe I should just go to sleep.

Welcome and thanks to all of my new followers, & love always to the lovelies that have been with me since the dawn of the beard.

Return now to your regularly scheduled tumblr.

N

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