(pain)

XIII.

         My migraines begin with no beginning. When a migraine starts, when it finds me; well there is no place, no point when it's found me for sure. Like the horizon in a gradient, like the birth of gray from the death of black and white. Because when I suddenly get a migraine, I suddenly feel pain the way it's always been there. In fact, there is only one migraine, I've never had more than one migraine, and it is always there, but not always beginning. Like a person you know: all of the person you know, your whole experience of that person, things about that person, is all of who you know you know, and all of that's inside you, always is. It somehow never leaves you, never stays in you, and you forget and you experience again and again; as soon as you see the person again, you know them again. And then life goes on and they are not physically present, and you forget until you remember. My migraine begins in a realm like halfway-asleep, a realm that exists in both asleep and awake, but not between. A No Place when anything could be, where nothing begins and nothing's eternal, and everything confusing can be seen confusing in all clarity, and things that start are not starting when they start. I don't know when my migraine finds me. Perhaps it's my head in orbit to the mass of potential that everything physical and experiential passes into: the chest of the body. And perhaps my head eternally undergoes phases, and in certain phases my head can be seen from the migraine that lives in the chest, and that's where it finds me.

         Pain is a funny thing because there are several ways it can hurt and several ways it can heal and several ways it can be happening and not hurt. It can afflict, it can teach, it can put you to sleep; it can wake you, ruin you, strengthen you, and drive you to a place when nothing makes sense and yet you experience the all-nonsense with all of your senses, and it's so clearly neither-either that suddenly you understand with an understanding that feels like it never began.

         There is physical pain, emotional pain, lonely pain; the pain of inseparability, the pain of winter, the pain of spring, the pain of transience and the pain of For Good. There is a pain for difficulty and a pain for simplicity. Pain can be tiny and inconsiderable, nagging and subconscious, undiscovered. It can be tremendous and sensational, it can carry you away to a sadness you don't want to be parted from, it can raise flags of blood and purpose that inspire waxing wind into your sails. It can steal your sails and leave you drifting to no purpose, it can cycle like fear and paranoia until you feel so alive from suffering that being close to death could not make you feel more alive. Pain can be the decay that fertilizes the soil, that nurtures things that grow. Pain can parent love, and hate, and indifference. It can be felt in every part of the body, of the chest, of the mind and heart, it can be felt it in places that don't exist and it can start and never start, kindle and douse fires. Pain can die while it's living, it can die and still be pain, hammering and aching and breathing in your head. Because pain is a funny thing; pain is both a thing separate from you and your experience of it. Pain knows the death of death as well as the death of life, and if it's seems closer to death it's because you are far from both death and life, which are always close together. Which are always found in each other, which are always like friends we know and we touch and we friend and we leave and we live. There is a No Point when pain becomes the death to your life, and the same No Point is where pain becomes the life to your death. Pain calls me back to my body, like a force that I can trust it brings my head to my chest, and there is water and air, and I can see the water and I can feel the air.

         Sometimes the pain is like a bowl of water; this is how the pain is separate from me. Sometimes when it's there the bowl seems really full, and if I am sitting and holding the very full bowl it means that I can't stand up without spilling it; this is how the pain is my experience of the pain that is separate from me. Sometimes the pain of not being able to stand up without spilling is water, more water put in the bowl such that a single breath would make it spill; this is a point where somehow the pain of the experience becomes the experience of pain. And it's a point where pain that is separate from me becomes a part of me, which is the start of the death of pain while it continues to live and be.

         Suddenly, I don't need the pain of pain, and it needs to be embraced. I can shove it away, bury it but the pain continues to be, and the pain of the pain continues to be. It can't be fought and killed---anyone with headaches must know that fighting headache pain makes it worse, and even medicine doesn't kill it. That if a headache dies after taking medicine, it was because of healing and not fighting, because a thing can be healed to its death. And pain of pain is very similar to the pain; it can be healed to its death, and then the pain still lives, but the feeling of pain has changed. The way all deaths are changes and not losses and not gains and not neither and not change. So I embrace it and I change, and the pain of pain is the part of me that changes, and the pain stays the same but I am living; for my head and my chest the pain becomes life, becomes a part of it, becomes a part of me like a bone in my body. Another sensation to live, another feeling to wake me up, to be awake so I am feeling the No Point that is always there that we don't always feel. The Point that our heads can't touch without our chest, that words don't touch, that's so essential it can't be described, is too complex, too simple to understand without knowing by feeling and can only be lived: the horizon between life and death, the line that makes our heads feel we are alive, and our chests know it.

(spring cleaning, part one)

II.

          Every four years or so I carefully---so as not to get dog fur and nasty crumbles on me---haul the rugs outside and lay them over a lawn chair or the broken railings that belong to the broken stoop or the bushes on either side of the railings. I find one of the dead branches that I keep in the bushes just for this purpose: to beat the rugs like a brute until they are dirty with bits of rotting wood and bark, because the dead branches have been rotting in the bushes since I put them there. They get so dirty that I resolve the matter as if it were a problem. I resolve to shake them by hand. And as I flap them in front of me I lean back and edge away so the accumulations don't enter my nose and mouth and eyes. But when all is through, I still sneeze and wheeze and rub my eyes and press on them and scratch my tummy and pick the strange sweat out of my bellybutton and sniff and look up to see if any neighbors saw that last part. When I need to make space, I have Spring Cleaning.

          I sit in my room and look. I sit and look til my butt goes to sleep. Then I stand. I stand and stare with my knees bending inwards underneath me, so that when I look down I can see my tummy and my thighs and my feet but I can't see my knees.

          I stand and stare everywhere til I can't feel my feet and I have to find my inhaler. It's spring cleaning and the spider in my chest knows it so she climbs up to my throat and spins a slimy net to catch naïve and reckless allergens. She has to hang fast because the web in my throat quivers up and down and shakes off little droplets as I hack and gulp the air. Her net dissolves under a gravelly shower of non-stick cooking spray flavor, sends the spider away like acid rain that's dull and wide in my throat. Then I return to my room and eyeball it. I pull a fishing rod from the nearby wreckage and I bless the sailors who died there and I brandish it at the tempest that sent them. I wedge it between an aluminum locker and a black cat, and l lever the locker up so that I can kick it onto its side and step into the one by two space I just freed up. I have to abandon the fishing rod before I make the step---I can't hold it with my teeth and I'll need both hands for balance. It's a tough decision, tough as Teflon but lucky me there's a fireplace poker within reach of my new position. I hear a cry of glee as I retrieve it. I go to work, poking at all the plastic pegs and fastfood napkins and wheeled office chairs and office chair wheels. If you push them hard enough they'll leave.

          I push the really old gluegun and the gluegun sticks that don't really fit and the typewriter ribbon and the travel-sized toiletries and brown paper grocery bags that must be pushed and not lifted because one handle is ripped and they're full of the heaviest things. I put the poker down and talk to the allergens. The continent of dust motes and dust mites and dog fur and crumbles and clay specks and catkins. They leave because they are too feathery to stand their ground as I talk to them. Then I consolidate the glow-in-the-dark stars that fell off the ceiling, that won't leave the room til they've all been reunited. I've heard that when you fall hard with others the bond is unbreakable. I consolidate them and they leave altogether.

With all the space of their absence I'm finding my Lost Boy's lost realty. I'm finding the land that I steward that got lost by me and found by them---the chewed up instruments that slum it behind desks. The hardly used pencils that live behind dressers because their erasers got used up. The pen caps that live with the pencils because they lost their meaning but had enough potential to stick around the neighborhood. Just In Case. I like them but I can't find proper homes for all of them, so I have to get the leftovers to hit the road.

          I squat and I listen to each of their sad stories and it's sad because they each have the same story. When they're through telling their tale they wail and show me the chew marks and maneuver their way to a place where I can't say no. But I'm in no place and they can't see that, so I can say no. When I say no I say yes and the room sheds a million places.

          I know that I have made enough space because the only things on the floor are feet. Clothes rack feet, dresser feet, table feet, poodle feet, trash can feet, briefcase feet, barstool feet, bed frame feet, futon feet, mouflon feet, easel feet, trestle feet, socks 'n feet. There's a typewriter with feet but its feet are so small and stubby and tucked underneath that they don't really count. So I prefer that the typewriter live on top of someone else with feet. When I've made enough space, I lie on the floor and stretch out, and my arms and my legs and my head and my hip bump into all the feet. But the stretching feels good and tender and energizing and the sunlight shows up and we lie in each other.

         Then I leave the room, I leave all the feet and I leave the sunlight.

(places)

I.

          There is a place in me, when I shake household lamps, any lamp-like containers within sight and reach, hoping to wake up a genie, wishing more for the magic than for the three wishes. When I give it up, if only because the genies are simply out-of-commission. When I am more skeptical about reason, not seeing a benefit of the Doubt.

          There is a place in me, when it stops raining, when I go outside and pace the wet street on my bicycle, for hours. Dreaming. When I stop, beneath dark chandeliers of glass globes and spindly pine needles, clocks of pale needles spraying towards the sky, towards me, towards the ground. Fanning outwards from the limbs of sloth Giants, who bow to children and their doggy friends and bend their bristly arms into upside down arches—upside down because their round elbows bowl downwards towards the ground, form the base of a half circle that the light and the rain and the wind fall through. Their slow hands sway in a great noble reach to the clouds, which leaves the children and dog-children in awe, and when the wind shows up, the great boughs shake small magic all over the dog-eared believers; glass worlds of flipped children, so small you can frame them with your thumb and index finger.

          When I stop there, and the trees send extra wet splashes to my scalp, and I can feel the round shape of the drops before they break in my hair.

          When I take the chance of looking up, see how long it takes before a raindrop falls in my eye, see what the rain looks like when you look straight up into it, to where it's falling from. When a close call closes my right eye with a force, turns my face downwards to the damp dirt that cakes the edge of the cracked cement, to the potholes and dips that house wide open puddles, when I gaze into a puddle and it's transparent, and I see the hole in the street underneath which is a girl gazing up at the sky beneath her.

          When I try to imagine the point where our two worlds meet, somewhere in the surface of the puddle. When there is no stable plane for the horizon between the two, there is no place to go to be between, except the place in each world where both meet.

          When I find my feet, and the hard wet surface that they fall to, when the toe of my sneakered foot flicks the kickstand, flicks it up flicks it down in a half circle motion, and I back up the bicycle so the pedals are ready for me to take off with rocket power; right pedal up, at the top of its cycle, left pedal down, a half cycle away.

          There is a place in me when my feet tread the air, so far above the clouds that my tangled hair drags dirt and leaves along the wood-chipped ceiling. When I see with my eyes that I'm a helium balloon that anyone let go of, that's finding the ceiling, floating up with a force that feels as heavy as my body, as strong as my feet touching ground, the pull that brings them to the ground. When I'm a helium balloon suspended an arm's length from the ceiling, caught against a band of black rubber, the opposite of a seat, between two pinchy chains of oil-black links.

          When I swing there, a million miles of blue and white air below my feet, the drop so far that I can't see any ground, and I am lucky that as I pump my legs and swing in a half cycle back and forth, I'm falling up.

          There's a very long, very small since between here and that place in me when I walk the nothingness above the ceilings of my house, stepping carefully over the rises in every doorway.

          Between here and that place when I'm breathlessly uncomfortable, caught against my giant brother's shoulder with the strongest force, strong as the heaviest weight of my body, falling me up like magic, like the anchored lamps that fall up and shed light down.

          When my giant brother calls me a Sack O' Potatoes, when he flips the world upside down and walks with his feet way above, touching the shoe-worn lusterless wood and unvaccuumed carpets, sprinkled with debris from outside and bits of yarn, the surface above me. The floor way below my feet is bright and blank, with an occasional spider that sticks out black against white, attracting my eye like a beacon. It's otherwise clean and lonely, repelling furniture feet, the feet of my friends and family, the feet of my giant brother magnetically, til they're unbudgingly far away and untouchable, like the light that falls up and sheds light down, like the anchored lamps lit with Sadly, the speedless magic of For Good.

          And through the long, small since stretches a freeway with alongside ditches, where muskrat guts and raccoon skulls and hollow squirrel carcasses go. And all the crows of my lifetime that got into the garbage on brisk Monday mornings decompose there. They were sentenced to decompose there the moment I set eyes on them and forgot, lost them to tear open their huge black presents, wrapped with hefty black plastic and perfumed with rotting peels and rancid pulp and wet paper, tied off at the top in a knot, or in a stretched plastic bow, or in stretched red knots. Mystery prizes dragged out to the street by the mailbox just for them, collections of lost and discarded and forgotten smelly pieces for the crows, who sleep on their collections of lost things in huge itchy nests by the wastewater runoffs that lead to the lake.

          All those crows of my lifetime go as masters of the lost to the alongside ditches and decompose there; they bring treasures like pipe caps that We As Children hopped on to throw the question, Water Gas Or Nothing?

          And they forget---except the one crow who's two wings and left foot are captured Somewhere, in seven frames of some unknowing someone's home video. That crow stays unsolid, Barely but remembered in the camera of my eye, like every eyelash I've shed and picked off my cheek and wished upon, wishing nowhere, to a question, whispering in my head because the direction of the wish is so unsure. Like every leaf of grass, shaft of wheat, stalk of corn, wild grass, every individual plant that passed me by at sixty miles an hour, that passed my window and was recorded by the camera of my eye, seen and forgotten, found and lost, the kind of block that builds Familiar. Along the freeway between here and that place in me; all of the since of growing like a bean, awkward and twisted and natural and steady.

          I think I'm moving through a space when the freeway is a place in me, instead of an unimaginable horizon between. When growing is a place that doesn't exist between a child's world and an adult's, but rather a place in each world when the two worlds meet.

Preface.

Dear Horse of a Different Color,

         I met you when I was nine years old and just beginning to feel at (with closed eyes and outstretched fingers) the edge of something bottomless. I thought for a while that it was death, and it turns out it is, but it's also Loss (only to beings, who won't keep being forever) and the internal world. And a permanence that bends in a way that makes it transient. I've never been to Oz; even when I was Toto, I had not yet been where you'd been, and never went. What color are you now? Always Changing can be a color. I think it is; I think Heraclitus and Parmenides will never reconcile, but their dichotomy can be lived for both, for the individual that sees a horse of a different color as Always Changing.

         I wrote you a letter some time ago. I'd say that I wanted to thank you for nurturing my inmost love and need for writing by encouraging me to articulate in earnest the things and phenomena of my daily life, like my jointed purple plastic jump-rope. (Do you remember? I wrote that I had a jump-rope, and you urged me to clarify whether it was purple or plastic. It was, in fact, a string of large, purple plastic penne noodles infused with medium-sized square sparkles, and had wooden handles on either end.) But the letter, which begins with "Hello", doesn't really say that. I'm not sure that's what I wanted to say when I wrote it; I'm not sure what I wanted to say, but I needed to say it. Which is why this letter here is for saying "Thank You." You facilitated many things for me. You gave me Orion's Belt---that ungivable closeness to things that are very far away.

         Life is a lot of things, and I'm living to say what I can in the words that I do for no reason but the one I need. That means everything to me, and can be more or less difficult to live (particularly for one who feels so un-one-way and so in an inconsistent practice of living).

         We are Always Changing. I don't know what to make of value---I make something all the time of various values, but I think in the end I only halfway believe that things and people and words and experiences have value in themselves bythemselves. In the end I believe in Intertrinsic, I believe that everything is an emergent phenomenon. So this collection of writings emerged from my interactions with the world, with myself and my dreams and experiences, with people I met and I knew and I lived for a short time and (never truly) left. It emerged from loss and growth, my interaction with.

         C’est cela,

                  Sola Vie