In my corner of the world

My corner of the world is small. You would think it's big, because I know you, and your friends, and their friends, and people beside. But it's not, I'm the only person who lives here.

My corner of the world is the place I sit with my knees drawn up to my chest. Sometimes it's peaceful to sit and observe; I've learned a lot from watchful eyes, listening ears, and more than a few moments stored in memory. But sometimes it's anguishing; when my mind is the only thing keeping me company at high speed, no brakes pace even though I'm not moving anywhere, the place where there is a small vacuum of time and space that wants to suck out the bottom of my esophagus so much that I can't stop moving or I'll stop breathing.

My corner of the world doesn't look like yours. It's hard to know if you would recognize it if you were there, or maybe you might have a name for it that I wouldn't call it, but the only name that matters is the one I give it. But sometimes your's might be a better name.

My corner of the world is sad sometimes, but I tell myself again and again that it's not only my corner. A corner has only two sides, and everyone knows that four walls make a room.

Yes, four walls make a room.

Bike ride.

softly
softly snowdrop
avoid drips from flooded eaves.

smear, smudge, scrub
two weeks
waiting

push, push, pedal
push, push, pedal

push, push

Lightning Rod

I imagine that I am standing in a big open field and it's storming all around me. I stand perfectly still; arms glued to my sides, knees locked and gazing straight ahead. Rain drips down my nose and soaks into my hair until each clump is saturated and bloated. Down near the ground, the grass brushes against my naked legs and feet, but I resist the urge to react.

Standing there trying to distract myself from moving, I think back to the other day when my friend was telling me about how humans can conduct electricity. I picture myself running around a house and every time that I pass an outlet small veins of electron matter jump out and stick to me. It would be comical except that in my dream I can't stop collecting these threads. I have a train of them streaming out from my body following me everywhere I go. I keep running around the house, which just gets me more and more tangled up with them. Eventually I run so far and long that I end up back here in the field, singularly standing and thinking. The electricity still covers me and I look around to see that the lines are streaming out around me like a parachute, covering the entire field.

I'm puzzling on these crazy electrical pathways when I begin to feel an immense overwhelming, anguishing tingling. It starts on the sole of my right foot and quickly travels up to my ears, then my nose and my forehead. I want so badly to scratch my nose but I don't move a muscle because in that moment I realize what's coming next.

The funny thing is that when the lightning hits I don't feel a thing. All the restlessness of before has gone and I'm left with the eerie sensation of time slowing down. The lightning rolls through me like a wave; each spot that it hits flops me back and forth like a rag doll breaking off the precious blue strands. Only when I am nearly at the point of breaking in half does it finally cease.

For a while afterwards I think that I stand and appreciate the silence of the end of a storm, which is actually an excuse, because my legs feel cemented in the ground and I really just don't want to move yet. After what seems like hours I finally hear someone calling my name in the distance. I begin walking, slowly, exercising my legs so they know how to act again. As I walk away I don't look back at the field. I know that there are not many real places where you feel like a lightning rod, and I don't want to see what I have left behind.

*originally published here on March 11, 2011. Of all the things I've ever written this is the one that shows up the most often in my thoughts, so I'm publishing it again.

Correspondance

Floating lonely, octopus,
in a sad, sad sargasso sea

I'll drift under waves.
A reflex. two. three.
Can't feel my arms just yet.

If I flail a bit, gracefully or otherwise,
if I curl myself into a ball and see how fast I can drop to the ocean floor,
if I get scared.

I'll use the ink to write this,
instead of a letter to you

One Ghost

Someone once told me that the way to rid yourself of a ghost is to spin around and around so fast that your world turns inside out, upside down and right side round. You will know that it's gone when you finally get up from the ground and look in the mirror to see nothing but a pale moonlight reflection of what you once were.

Ghosts sneak in and grab your arms from behind when you least expect it. They toss you into the melee of lost thoughts and bittersweet memories. And it's not enough to turn your world on its head; their presence is unintentionally innocent and it's hard to fault them for that.

My growing up house has just one, one small ghost. And the last time she appeared I cleaned and scrubbed and screamed and cried so hard that the house was spotless. I sanitized everything for days and days with fanatical zeal and once I finally stopped to rest only the echos of my footsteps were quietly ringing in my ears.

But she came back one day last week when I was still warm from the cradle of summer and her cold breath froze me like the icy North wind. And as I sat trapped between frozen steel and the deluge of her life's achievements poured over me freezing my bones I swore to myself that it wouldn't be the same again.

Last time I got spun round like a washing machine, emerging rubbed raw and my pink tender skin flinched at your name. But this time I vow that I'm not going to spin around in circles because there are other ways to rid yourself of a ghost. I'm going to set fire to my growing up house and the flames will be strong enough to melt an icy cage, and they'll burn hot enough to scald away hand prints on my arms, and will be beautiful enough to watch standing on mountains above it all.

The thing about ghosts you always have to remember is that they were alive at one point. And the one thing we all know, right from birth, is that ghosts can only haunt you when they're dead. But this ghost won't haunt me anymore. I'll watch it float slowly away in the smoke of my house, away and away to the North horizon.

2236 hrs

And the soul of the still, still night
settled over the city

I walked my sidewalk home

Moonlight Dog; one, two, three
licked my shins

to make up for
A lax shower

My Growing Up House

My growing up house has four outside walls.

It has a door. A solid door and a squeaky door. An entering and exiting door. A good door to come by.

It has a big window. And in the evening the night becomes the backdrop and also the mirror into quiet lives inside.

It has an upstairs bedroom at the top of the stairs. There is no wall and no door and no unheard voices or private regrets.

It has a wood floor that has been travelled by many feet. This floor bears the sweat of the worker, the sweetness of the generous, the tears of the broken hearted. And gathers the whispers of the ones who pass through like cobwebs in the corners.

It has three cats that sit on my front steps. One that moves too fast, one that follows, and the wild one that I don't understand. I don't even like cats all that much.

It has a guitar that sits in the corner of the room. Cloaked in nervous anticipation, the waves of sound diminish upon close inspection.

It has two cedar trees standing guard at the entrance and a few herbs that sit in pots on the back deck. There is an opportunity for a garden to be started and to be trained and from which to reap the unknown benefits of the harvest.

It has rice and beans and oatmeal in the cupboard, and rarely, ice cream in the freezer. Clearly it benefits from the addition of others.

My house has a roof with a modest view of the middle of a tree. And a spectacular view of the open sky and the friendly waving leaves.

It has a place where I lie on the floor and look at the ceiling. I watch myself thinking in the reflection of the glass light until the lines between reality blur with the dreams of could-have-beens and I almost fall asleep.

It doesn't echo my thoughts as loudly as my footsteps creak across the floor. But I can hear you come up the stairs as I sit and wait, poor and impatient.

It has enough room inside for my bikes, but not enough room for a phone conversation. So let the sky and the four walled wind be my phone booth and my centre for therapy.

It sits on a hill and somedays that hill seems much steeper than the day before. And less steep the next day, or just about the same, or basically flat, and sometimes insurmountable. Today I worked hard to get home, but I've been practicing lately, so it was a little easier.


But I have to apologize because I might have lied. My growing up house is actually empty, only filled with a few found items from along the way and in the end, I am the one who is growing up.