emergency contact.

It is 5 something in the part of the morning where it is still dark and quiet and the floor does not creek above. Sleep is being digested in every direction. Your body is cold or covered in sweat. Your only company is the dryness on your skin asking to be itched. You are nude or gathered up in cotton. It is too soon for an alarm to alert you to wake. Not too early for cars to speed over potholes; you can hear their tire marks and the traffic lights turn. You can hear the weight of too many thoughts climb away from you. Who do you call?

The sun is in a dressing room somewhere, too high up to be captured by photographers. It is getting fitted for a new layer of heat. If the sun could speak, it might stage a performance piece that addresses the discomfort of trying on anything new. It has a complicated relationship with the moon; in this moment, they are treating each other with silence. There are birds, but the phone cord doesn’t reach. Alone, the sun wishes to call someone, but its height and burn has pushed everyone away.

The elephant gets distracted by the shine of water reflecting off rocks and leaves like skinny, green rafts. The others have gone off and it can feel a shutter resonate from the ground below. Footsteps can be a map back toward where one needs to go: an indentation or rhythm of heel pounding against earth. But the connection is bad and these impressions are full of static. So, the elephant remains. There is nothing left to eat here, so it chews on its loneliness, caught up in the grooves of teeth and breath. Time is marked by temperature drip and the way the light turns into an overwhelming shadow.

The human sits inside a room, which is window’d and warm. Their body is empty from dreams carting away the indigestion of the previous day’s meals. They search for the right words to call this feeling. Letters become replaced by sounds, which become a collision of wails. This human ages and is alone. Feels like the sun because although this human has been described as bright, isolation has become its emergency contact. Feels like an elephant because although this human has been titled traveler of pages, wrinkles of sad decorate each fold and tumble of bones.

It does not get easier. So there is a cling to meditation and old habits. There are diets and doors. Everyone is so attached to the plastic in their pockets, but when it rings, no one answers.

If this were an emergency, could you be found?

 

 

 

 

how to be alone.

Thank you, Rebel, for reminding me the beauty of one’s own strength that comes from being alone.

“Society is afraid of alone. Like lonely hearts are wasting away in basements. Like people must have problems if, after awhile, nobody is dating them. But lonely is a freedom that breathes easy and weightless and lonely is healing if you make it.”   –Tanya Davis.

Wherever you may find yourself: in a town of less than 8,000 where breaths freeze against windows into oxygenated icicles or one in 8.3 million where the buildings are so tall, you can barely see beyond the door frames. Loneliness exists in crowds and in rooms full of only you. Loneliness exists underground and flying above clouds. Shared meals can be lonely and so can celebrations.

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and books written in a foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers which cannot be given you, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then, gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” –Rainer Maria Rilke

Why must I exist like this?

Can’t I just ignore the bother of my bones?

If I stop looking into my reflection, will I forget about the stranger living inside?

What makes me a poet?

What if I’m not the poet I told you I am?

How can I lift weights to grow muscles in my heart and strengthen my scars into fierce survivors?

Have I lost one more chance at love because of because of all those times I pushed it away?

Will I ever accept my gender?

Now that I’ve spoken on the discombobulation of my body, how do I proceed?

Even though it’s clean, I still fear my blood as though it is an enemy; why?

How do I trust another to accept the disrobe of my body?

How do I trust myself to accept the disrobe of my body?

Does this ever get easier? Or will I ever understand why/how I have remained so long?

 

If I can just hold onto these words, like hands, keeping me safe and balanced. This language will help me to cross the street. These letters will dine with me at night and read alongside me. This dialect will be my guide. My musical accompaniment. This loneliness is my band-aid, preparing every part of me to heal so that when another enters, I will be ready.

 

 

 

 

break(it)down

There is a reason for all of this, but you may still need to break down break it down.

If you want to appreciate life, lose it for three weeks and see what was there all along. When someone asks you if you are polyamorous or monogamous, say: both and neither. Green tea can be the perfect elixir for loneliness and morning breath. Extend a dinner invitation to the one that got away. Serve a scavenger hunt of moon shadows and graffiti. The mosquitoes have yet to arrive, though your desire for them extends in your lust to be bitten. There is no definition for the bruises on your arm, but feel free to blame the earth for pushing too heavily on you. If there is such a thing as the business of sadness, what is the 401K plan or how to succeed without really trying. You are not alone; there is just no one around you. If  they knock on your window at 2:21 in the midnight, asking for a sip of poetry or bath of collected salt and sand, let them in, let them in, let them in. Fear love only if you are ready to reconfigure it again. Tape verbs to your body when you forget how to move. Collect stories like dandelion wishes and at the end of an evening, remember that we are all just passing through.

there is room for you.

It is difficult to breathe in here. The sky drops wounds and slashes cover the sidewalks. Where to walk where to walk. So there is grief and there is love and if you can just admit that this city is too cool like high school all over again and sometimes Brooklyn may want to banish you from its lunch table and where to walk and where to walk.

There is a garden hidden inside bellies which bloat until roots can roam free and it may be difficult to find sunshine that isn’t distracted by something else so pull out your best joke and make that star show its teeth.

Your gloom can be boat-like. Float away or crack it open and use it for firewood. There is blue and red and green in this grey. Weigh away its isolation and lick the salt of its moonlight.

 

No one is the only so gather up the ugly. Find father’s seam ripper and unhinge unhinge unhinge.