Windy Spring

It's the wind, most days, the brevity of dusk, the anxious stupor that I always find myself in, that causes my heart to jump and my ribs to ache, bone crunching, soul crushing exhaustion. The wind will whip in through the open window in the dead of night and rip my pictures raw from their hooks and shake me until I shudder and stutter out a startled shout. Sometimes the door will close for no reason at all, no wind, no air, no light nor sound but it will close and all I can do is stare after it, wondering what spirit got too tired of the outside oppression. I know it's the spirits. I believe them to be mischievous, but benevolent nonetheless. I hope them to be benevolent nonetheless. 

It's quiet some days. I dream of the summer where I ran whirlwind around the weedy whey and lost myself kindly in the depths of the marsh, where my gold tennis shoes would truck home muck but the wisdom they gained from the seeded experience outweighed the way the whole delicate situation seemed contrived. It's not my happy place, I don't have one, but those days remind of a Monet painting, something in the garden. There were few flowers and lilies, but I layed my pounding skull upon the green grass and twirled hay through my locks like keys and thought of better days, sound days, days with meaning, days I could marry. 

I have been out of breath in the rain more times than I can count. It seems like most days it follows me, a chilling cascade that soaks my scalp and taints my suede coats and floods my feet. 

I've been dancing more, I have, I have an awful habit of thinking behind my legs until I'm wrapped up like a pretzel and forced to look at the sorry mess in the floor length mirrors that surround the room. I have great disdain for them, oh I do, they remind me how human I am, how much in the present I actually am. I try not to think of the present, like the march hare, I'm always late, always late for something, my future life is waiting like a telephone operator: she's not picking up ma'am, would you like me to try again? would you like me to try again? would you like me to try again?

I have doubts. I have actresses of yesteryear traipsing across my brain. I have stars and moons and jagged pieces of glass digging, forcing their way under my heart through a weak rib, a nervous tick, a cardiac catastrophe. Books have spines as do we but what do ours say? What are our titles? Our names, maybe, the adjectives we use, the adjective others use? The movies we've seen and watched once on basic cable. The salty burgers we've choked down. The music we heard in a grocery store once and haven't heard since. What is carved onto our back, that which we cannot see outright? What if it's nothing? What if it's everything? Take that knife with bone handle shaped like a woman's leg and carve instructions into my bare back. Make me cry, I don't care, but please let me bleed it out, the secrets to the universe, the cosmic humor, a cosmic coronary. It all doesn't seem so far in the end, but I'll send you a message carved into the backs of my knees and across my eyelids. Read me like you would the newspaper after the apocalypse. Just read me to need me, feed me rough tweed and mead so I'll grow strong like a reed, up from a little seed, freed of mother earth that bleeds, a cruel deed that we lead the innocent among the milkweed, our misdeed, we mislead and they misread, and come back with nosebleeds caused by ragweed and we tell them they will succeed but we damned the children oh lord, take heed, we killed the children, we killed their spirit we sent them out into the world and they came back wrong, they came back harsh, they came back like me and you and he and they and they came back dead. They can walk and talk but we deceived them and those deceived them and the past deceived the predecessors and the universe always wins it's hand in the end.