It was 5:15 a.m. and my hands felt like doorknobs stapled to my wrists.
My fingers had been absorbing the bulk of rain-wind-early-morning-wintery-chill combo, and I had to garner support from at least three of them to shift the gears on my bike. I’d long since forgotten I possessed toes.
I was biking to Il Forno, the Italian bakery at which I play brunch chef on the weekends, and wearing as many layers as I can zip a puffer jacket around. My core was nice and toasty, but the appendages dangling off my body were suffering. My face, too. The wind seemed to harbor vendetta against me, and was shifting with me every bend I took. It wouldn’t have been so bad if it weren’t raining; the wind fashioned the drops into torpedo pellets and drove them into my eyeballs.
How warm the rain this morning!
It is a morning to sing along with—
the rain a drum beat on the roof of my helmet
the whoosh of rubber through puddle a cymbal
I let all the car alarms, too, be bird song
and my grin swells with the wind and the clouds.
It is a day to breathe, like the wind, a bit deeper
to look at those clouds, like that, a bit longer,
to hope that I die before those trees do
to ask of the birds, who am I to outlive you?
Over family dinner of Moroccan-spices-plus-all-the-veggies-in-the-fridge, Max asked me a question in reply to some nonsense sentences I was spouting:
“What does it feel like, for you, this concept of being ‘grounded’?”
Shamefully I had already forgotten the sentence I had said which, I’m assuming, contained the word “grounded”. Actually, I’d forgotten the entire context for it. I had simply been speaking sentences I believed to hold together loosely in intellectual progression of thought. This is a common side effect of the days I spend cycling through the hills singing loudly to myself and not practicing human conversation.
I trudge through the desert
while balancing the water on my back,
blinking to uproot the flies
and to bat away the sticky sweat
from rolling in my eyes.
My vision is blurred by endlessness;
no mountain no tree
no landmark just dunes
and this dusty shuffle casting
fiery shadow prints.
My feet sink ever deeper,
deeper in the blister sand
with every stumble my knees
bow closer to the scorched earth
and I come closer
to reverence.
There are so many concepts
I don’t understand so many theories
I can’t fathom
I don’t know little things
like the number of
people in my town or whether
my maternal side is republican
or otherwise. I don’t know what
it’s like to be a black woman, or
Once
I was chased by Swastik gents
and big boned ladies.
The ladies wielded buckets
of rotting salmon, I remember
specifically, because
I hate salmon.
The gents wielded extroversion
and I couldn’t bear that either. Continue reading “Die Traumdeutung”
O, to be new and to yearn;
when my burden is dreams
untamped
untoppled
inevitably unwise,
leftover evergreen haystacks upon
bamboo and bits of forest, sun filled
powdered sugar dreams
with no good reason
except for every reason.
In the darkness
I drape legs over the back of the bench
rest back upon the wooden planks.
Arms unleash
and dissolve to the ground, fingers spread
to caress velvet Grass.
The curl of the seat tilts chin to Stars
who moan beneath Shroud. I sing along.
Wind captivates waterfall hair and Earth
waits.
We are breathless.
As Earth groans and shivers
I observe Mountain grow taller;
the childbearing summit,
too many spines to count in a single lifetime,
she sees me. So small below.
She gathers Wind and bids him
go to me.
He whistles through my hair, disrupting cyclical thoughts,
for a spell, with gusts of play,
then rises and rejoins her.
She invites Sunlight in for tea
and lets him linger.
The library is, for me, punctuality’s greatest weakness.
Especially Auckland’s public library, a carefully laid, intertwined system of so many books in so many libraries dotting so many corners. I can’t seem to sweep my gaze from east to west without spotting a library.
They call to you.
My dreams are the dew on the
morning grass and the sound of the drops
‘neath the leaping grasshopper.
It seems the cold darkness of a swallowed
night blessed the condensation of what deeply
matters; that which shines bold against the
thousand thrashing insects. I wish I could
say thank you, say anything, really, but the
sunshine is blossoming over my closed eyelids
and all I know is warmth.
Goats climb high on bamboo branches
attempt to avoid the electric fence and
I’ve got to say
we have that last bit in common.
Their switch is to my left and I flick it off.
I wonder
to whose left is my switch.
It’s consistently on—
a quick jolt on the left arm, a
sharp buzz through the kneecap I don’t
know the pattern I just screw up eyes
and tangle knuckles in fists.
