day 23: vitamins

These days have begun to stretch. They have begun to expand as though new bones have sewed themselves to the sun, dangling like elongated bells, alerting us that after all this grey shiver, there will be warmth again.

The humans grow more fur to keep themselves warm. They cover themselves in wool and thermal in order to combat the winter freeze.

Recently, I have been advised to ingest more Vitamin D. The sun grows shy in the winter, or perhaps this season permits the sun to go on holiday. It exists, but in far less moments. Gunmetal grey and taupe grey and cadet grey and silver replace cornflower blue and tufts blue and cerulean blue and azure.

When the sun arrives, my friend tells me, walk outside. Even if it is so cold your fingers forget how to curl. Leave your sunglasses behind [I don’t own any] and allow your corneas to inhale the vitamins. On days when the sun forgets to wake, you must take Vitamin D.”

But must I take a pill? I query. Ar there foods I can eat, which are full of this?

We are all vitamins, she insists. We are made up of all sorts of chemicals. Outside, the sun is best, but sometimes you need to swallow what your body craves, even if it is difficult to digest.

there is colour here in this black-and-grey.

Call this Sunday. Order up two hundred kites shaped in sizes ranging from dragon to sperm whale. Turn up your boom box attached to hip, playing a mash-up of Charlie Parker and Tupac. Gather up your grass stains. Dig toes into flesh of earth, meaty syllables of soil. Stop worrying about what your hair looks like or if there is dirt on your face. You are meant to get messy sometimes. Write a poem on a rock, found beneath a leaf. Turn your handwriting upside down. Throw it into a puddle and if there are none nearby, make one with stored up tear drops, created by the wind. Have an impromptu picnic in your neighborhood park with local fruit purchased at nearby farmer’s market. Stain your fingertips with ink of recycled newspaper. Depending upon how bold you are, make love beneath this hunched-over sun and blanket hiding the limbs of you and your other. The ones nearby will leave you alone, too impressed by your boldness to interrupt. Remain until the air drops causing your sweat marks to shiver. Bike toward the sun’s replacement called: moon. This one is dripping lust. All around it echoes of moans. Offer up your black-and-grey lips to a rainbow. Watch the stain saturate the rest of you. Call this love’s contagion.

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?

 

 

 

 

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.

you are orange like that sunrise like the vitamins I forget to take

And when eyes first begin to arrive into a Thursday, there is recognition of love in the sky. Who made the sun loose enough to drip color around the clouds like that? That orange makes me forget who I am makes me forget I am headache’d and weary makes me forget to remember.

A beautiful Human/ Dancer/ Writer tells me to prepare for love. We are all in need of it about this time, she says. I forget to tell her to look up because that is where I find the best warmth and when I am in worry, up there is where I watch movies in the cumulo-nimbus.

But. Even amidst this sunrise, I am fearing. When I am trapped below ground in an attempt to go to work or go to go to, I panic about what haunts the ones traveling with me. What is their weapon? Is it just their newspaper? Is it their sleep? My breaths will not protect me from anything harsher than that.

In a diner on an evening when I treat myself to a supper of vegetable soup and broccoli rabe, I look around. How angry are these eaters and can they live inside their rage without action? Should I rush my swallows?

How safe are we really from each other from ourselves from the ones who forget to look up at that orange at that beauty-full sun.

I used to take several vitamins, pushed on me by a love very similar to that sky: vast, illuminating, hard to reach. Then the day would begin and I would forget. So I popped bites full of ingredients instead of capsules. I digested plates full of food instead of pills full on the alphabet. If I kept swallowing those letters, would I be like that sky? Would I be orange? Would I be strength?

I have come to realize that almost everyday, I wear a vest. Black. Old. Used. Some smaller than others. Some torn. One newly mended. I have come to realize these vests are my armor. Perhaps they can protect me from what I can not prevent. From the tempers of earth’s inhabitants.

We cannot all live in the sky. The sun has boundary issues and likes to feel like the only one. But we can shine down here too. And we can replace bullets with poems, slam them into eardrums without blood shed, and instead, awaken minds. And let’s not wait for tantrums to explode into buildings full of people full of life full of hope. There is too much death down here. So look up. Be mindful of that beating heart in the sky. Go blind for awhile. Blink the shadows of its heat against your face. Slow down. There is enough beauty up there. Now lets start making some down here. We are all in need of it about this time.