I’m floating. But I’m floating in a foxhole, floating in the trenches. My hat is so low I can taste the brim when I breathe too deep, and I keep waiting for the darkness to bring me just a little bit closer to the primal urges. They’re what take me home at the end of the day, the thrumming of the vehicle beneath me, the shrieks of the mortars.
I keep waiting for release.
No, it’s not death, it’s for the past to finally invoke my name and release me from its withered fingers. It’s for my breath to rise like smoke and envelop the sky with its glory. For me to know I’m alive more than the wind-up toy with the broken gears, straining to lift one little foot for entertainment.
I’m the storybook with the pop up pages, I come to life in 2D, but not like I come to life when the sun sets. In the darkness I breathe it in, live it, hold it, kiss it. It’s mine and only mine in the alone-time when I’m what constitutes as me.
I run low, I run high, my muscles strain in weakness and I can feel the ligaments snap like fireworks on the fourth of July. Crackle like the embers in the hearth, dance with the fire, dance with the colored sparks when the hands of the clock line up. The marble can only be alive if you believe it is, and Pygmalion can’t wait any longer for her to come to life. What makes me think that? He’s turning to stone himself.
I want to be the one who can pick up the hammer and shatter the glass walls, step out of the exhibit and blow a kiss to the guards. Putting my left foot in and knowing what it’s all about is just another thing on my wish list, Santa. I want to experience what it is to feel this thrill that comes only from the breath taken aside from the rabble. Whispered to, held close in the dark corner of the party, the ceiling opening up like a package at Christmas till I can number the stars.
Descendants as many as the grains of sand on the beaches, all like the Son of Sam, can be lifted to the sky. But what of boulders? The sources of the sand? Will they wait like tiny children clustered behind skirts of their mothers for something miraculous to happen? For the food stamps to disappear and for the welfare to turn piss-yellow apartments into palaces?
I’m not the kind of person who is blinded by pain, or for whom sleep is the only comfort they can afford. I’m what people call a “walker”, eyes alit with passion for the next step, the tomorrow that never comes. We shall have jam yesterday and tomorrow but never today, so get out your butter-knives and kiss logic goodbye. It was born of fear, you know, logic is the bastard child of humans willing their impulses to go away. Rationalizing what shouldn’t have been tampered with, writing on the Mona Lisa with a sharpie.
It’s all here, in the now, in the light that sears my eyes. Maybe, in the palest recesses of my mind I’ll find the answer trapped in a prism, broken and scattered into color that I can’t quite remember. The edge of a dream, the softness of the twilight, the knowing.
Knowing too much and knowing too little are my simultaneous crimes. I show and tell about my pony, then wonder why it’s stopped eating. I wonder why it only lies down, why those big dark eyes won’t close, yet the neighs still echo through my head. I have to find the answer somewhere in the spiral, the pull, the way I tremble when I know I’m breaking the sound barrier.
When I know I’m reshaping under my own face, and I’m loving every minute of it.