Lock and Key

In my dream I open my mouth wide and reach the key inside. I find the metal lock and nestle the key into the crooked gate. Turn and click. Something is happening. I can pull it out now. I have passed the test even though I don't know what is being tested. 

But as I pull the lock becomes bigger, lodges in my throat, fills the cavern of my mouth and presses my tongue deep into my jaw. My teeth ache. I am unable to breathe. With the lock in place none of this was happening. Can I put the lock back deep within, click it closed, breathe around the obstruction? I mean, at least I’m breathing, right? 

But no, now that I know its there I can’t go on living with this barrier to my full breath (breadth), my voice. I cannot swallow the imposition away. And so I pull. The lock tears at my cheeks and my lungs ache without air to nourish them, me. 

I pull.

I wake. The heaviness in my chest is still there. I gasp for breath and savor the coolness of the morning air running down my throat.  

I make a cup of tea, meditate (breath in, breath out) go to my desk, flip open my laptop.

Click and release, the screen flashes to life. The keyboard unlocks under my fingers and my voice pours out, pushes that dream lock out, over, gone.

Almost. 

It waits in the wings (under my desk, under my bed) for another morning when I say I am too busy to write (busy with what?), an evening when I claim I am too tired to use my voice (knowing the fatigue will let more truth pour forth), too wrapped up in taxes or paperwork or scheduling more Busy-ness to feel some sort of purpose. 

Without even knowing it I place the lock back into my head with each excuse. I am my own jailer, my keeper, but in my hand I hold the master key. With consciousness, one day, I will be awake enough to raise this hand holding my self-fashioned prison and throw both lock and key into the river. I will simply let the words flow and rust that metal into the riverbed, back into the earth, shards of metal and words flowing to the sea. 

Why

 not

 today.

Breathe and float

I cannot catch my breath and so I sail forward into the day,

my exhalation fueling momentum, 

my inhalation creating the calm before the storm.

I cannot finish my list, so I up-end the table with a simple lift and push. Over it goes, a listing ship of to-dos and not-dones; a n’er-do-well am I. 
I feel better when the wooden legs are broken, the chairs upset, the cutlery and pencils scattered across the tile, papers fluttering as my breath grows ragged and then (spokes of the hurricane) quiet.

I cannot quiet the looping in my head and so I run the opposite direction from where I sit on the field of floor, my dreams distracting me from the anger and fear sprinting throughout. 

Yet I return, out of breath, to my thoughts in this memoried track meet, a meeting of mind and heart and all the places my feet have been. We choose our loops or they choose us.

And the clouds gather.

I cannot gather my thoughts enough to choose between tasks and so I curl up in bed and read and read and read. I pull my laptop close to me and words spill out in barbed clickity-clacks and dripping pauses, a river of sentences full of jumping commas and gnashing dashes waiting to be caught, gutted, filleted, and devoured.

I am the hand on the pole and the hook and the jaws clamping down. 

It starts to rain.

I turn to look at myself and the words play dead in upturned palms.

My to-do list flops around, breathless, on the floor.

I am moved to stay still in this flood of not-enough, obligation circling at my ankles, pant cuffs wet with guilt and perceived failure. The current pulls me, it is too strong to resist and I am soaked in old tales. They rush into my lungs as I go under, commas and dashes thrashing about my head, sharp-toothed numbers sizing up my longevity and worth, jumbled letters clinging to my thighs. 

It is the words that untangle and push me up to the surface. Buoy me with susurrations of truth. I take a breath and feel the sky clearing and see the shore and taste the wind. I am floating. I can feel the turbulence underneath the surface but these words keep me afloat, above the flood, below the storm, in the soft dampness of the in-between.

I cannot catch my breath and so I sail forward into the day,

my exhalation fueling momentum, 

my inhalation creating the calm before the storm (that washes the sky clean).

Words on Strike

The words creep and crawl around the noise filling my head. They put tiny curlicued palms to Courier ears and stomp over the Arials to escape the din. We are in need of swirling silence, they want to say, but the other sounds are too loud for them to speak, so they continue to stomp, to cringe, to stumble around the latticed areas of my parietal cortex.

I stop suddenly as an itch becomes a steady burn in my head. They are getting upset and I can feel it. They are fighting back now, not simply scurrying away to hide in folds and fluid. I put the broom down; cleaning can be done later. Off goes the Spotify, twangy banjo cut off mid-riff. I finish chewing that handful of walnuts I wasn't really hungry for but needed internal noise to drown out the external.

I sit on my stool. It is green vinyl on a painted green metal base. The color has worn away where boots once fidgeted, now my bare feet. I get up from my stool because I remember there is one dish left to be washed, a load of laundry to be done, my bed has not yet been made! Those clothes on the floor should be hung up, organized, sorted, donated. And have I looked at the bathroom lately? Dust on the toilet tank...

I wash the dish.
I know this is a trap. I dry my hands and sit back on my stool. I stare.

It is quiet in this room except for the planes overhead and children laughing in the water and the occasional rumble of furniture being moved upstairs (this happens more than normal, I believe). It becomes white noise as I sit and stare and wait. The words uncup their ears and emerge from their hiding places. They wander and touch and greet one another and start to sing down the lines from the deep gray. They clap and dance and I can barely keep up with their ramblings but am joyously energized by the tumbling of symbols onto the page.

They want to be heard.

I only have to stop and listen.

A universal schoolyard

I am tethered.

I am the scuffed white ball at the end of the string. The faster I spin, an attempt to flee, to forget, smacked by hardened palms and youthful grunts, the faster I wrap myself around the pole lodged in the earth. I hit the weather worn metal with a hollow thud. I am suspended for a second kissing the gray, thankfully still… then I fall away, unravel myself from my destiny, wait for the next throw and punch.

I expect it. So far that is the only way I’ve known to stop the spinning, the constant motion circling that pseudo silence within every continuously acrobatic atom.  I think that if enough beings push me I can attain my goal. Instead, what if I withdrew, stopped begging for the nudges and slams? What if I just lay still? A memory flits past fibers, remembering how stillness feels every so often between the back forth back.  

I am (will be) still tethered (to the ocean, farming, my writing) but I am not tangled up in it, always trying to be simultaneously free and closer. I am not (will not be) twisted and pulled and smashed into the gray (of gloriously squally sunset-less evenings, no land in sight. Of the rocks and slug underbellies and spider eggs in gossamer sacs. Of black words and white paper fusing into one). 

If I resign myself to stillness, to the quiet of disengagement, then I simply lay against my desires, my string straight and unstrained, my body able to re-inflate those bruised spots and enjoy the emanating warmth of earthly minerals nestled up next to me, whispering, “Isn’t this better?”

The kids will still want to play, prove their strength, I know this too.
But the intervals can shift, I can be less attractive to battle. Like the ships the Native Americans didn’t see, I will be out of context to tangles and strikes. I will melt into the gray with my scuff marks and dirt and age and the string won’t even be necessary anymore.

Naturally tethered, the struggle dissolved, the hard fists no where to be seen, felt, imagined.