10:22 PM
These motions we take with smiles, these waves we willingly let crash over us, desiring to fill our mouths with tingling anticipation. How we sit, the sand rolling and moving and washing over us until we are buried alive under our own fantasies; we inhale all of it with shaky breaths that drown us steadily in our sheets. What else can we do but lay and shiver as we are immersed in endless droplets of water we cannot drink, cannot feel but only in expectation? Why should sparks lend themselves to the road of my spine, petering out into a firework display of my shoulders? My head, bent so low over tumbling words, does not lay heavy upon any chest; who can heave under its confusion and fear of the future? Can it willlingly place itself on sticks planted so high in altar-grounds of words and emotions and nebulous feelings that blindly grasp a dull, metal medallion?
A vision of what could be passes its tarnished features weeping through my fingertips, if how tiny fingers cling to belt loops and tiny thumbs stroke strong hip bones all the while shaking under cold skin. Anything is truly possible when they trace such doubts and fears and veins of self-depreciation, of unworthiness, of uselessness. Greatness, the ever-elusive word. The angry, green-eyed snake coils around the neck of the ever yearning, the ever hopeful, the ever useless endeavors of beating muscles behind closed bars. Once-new shoes stand steadily in muddy puddles while green, green hills roll happily by, hurling themselves onward, forward. What comes of childish attempts but realizations that hills are more than mountains, more than glaciers hungrily eating at your toes and icing your fingertips.
And when this body is gone, when all of the visions and dreams and shameless attempts are chewed up and swallowed up into the cold permafrost of slow-moving rocks and dirt and grime, will it still produce warmth? Will it hum and tickle your feet when you walk over unmarked graves of hummingbirds and albatrosses and shoes never worn? Can it still grow poppies to will to you sleep in a gentle caress, if only for a while?
Can a grand old oak ever enjoy the company of a wilting dandelion?
