(the things I am full of)

XIX.

         A pipsqueak collects coins where flat tears fall from my nose and collect at my upper lip to dribble across a bridge of drawn lips and leak through and go inside before they drip down my corrugated chin. The coins are indian paisas that impress my ankle with twos and fives and the pipsqueak is a hiccup that sews together smothered gasps and garage-zene-zinging and the boy tracing the circle the same never the same on my back, sews them together with a softly fraying string of truncated rhythm and cricks in skeletons and gray solitaire cards and a phone message encompassing an extensive hesitation.

         I like to exclaim I don't know when I am sure that finally I am lost and not sure and full of things and sadness for the things that I am full of. I'm scared of one way but love the one-ways I find ragpicking; like I see the blood that leaves my ankle and taste the pain of the laminate floor, assaulted by all our feet, taste the pain in my ankle, draw a softly fraying string that closes the bag most of the way and makes the string longer than the pain in my chest for all the things it's full of. Cellophane floaters drift with my general layout of vision and trim unseen walls in scenes of questioning, of exclaiming I don't know as the hiccup emerges from the union of bitter and sweet, the birth of terrible clarity and detailed confusion, magnificent gray, as the hiccup is also the seam between the two, between the five between the three.

         My hurting head is beginning to burst in the middle because there are no seams or serges, no edges, and my heart aches and hums sweetly with the collective sobbing of innumerable tiny incompletes, complete in every limb: possibilities grieving for birth and lamenting impossibility, lamenting realization enough to know at least their loss, their impossibilities. My chest swells with experiencing. And neither fast nor slow but feeling generally quick my diaphragm squeezes until I find myself casting the idea of weeping, the air of it, preceded by the labor pains of art and the glicking sound of a utensil stirring congealing mac and cheese, preceded by doubts and slightly sticking lips and peeled-off jelly electrodes and recycling bottle caps with chase scenes, casting the air of all of it, a short air, an emptiness devoid of my fullness and what I'm afraid to lose, casting all of it into half a glass of low-calorie lemonade, at the surface of which lies a lifeless fruitfly whose short-statured emptiness and solitude are ready to accompany my jetsam with improbable solidarity.

(in a corner)

V.

                   There is a corner of my vision

                          Where the window blows sunlight

                         On the synthetic hairs of my lykafur coat.

    

                                                     The sun’s contact is a shimmer that’s

           Meek like shy smiles, (barely there)

 Sweet the way a smile

         Tastes sweet before it happens

                          Tastes like puckered lips, 

              Watering mouth, whistling (and all these words)

              Interrupted by a smile. (stretched to touch the junction)

      In a corner of my vision,

   The glimmer could be (scattered and still)

                    A fine coat of dust (more than half hollow)

                   Glinting shyly (looking back)

                     From a glossy net (missed the nexus)

                         From empty floss-like netting.

                                                                                              (I think I’m here)

                  A still breeze of sunlight from the window

                                             The accumulating dust

                                                           Causes the delicate architecture to wink

                                           The arachnid knitting to breathe.

(It could be,

There in a corner of my vision.)

(spring cleaning, part two)

IV.

         My feet find the muddy floor of a lagoon, slick with weepy laments and salty lumps of tears that never made it past my throat. They slip through the silky murk in lugubrious sweeps and squelch in satisfaction when they come to a stop. A moment standing still and they are sunk. But Spring Cleaning is too invigorating to stay sunk. There's the delightful prospect of discovering new fossils, gumps of litter, and chucked rocks that chipped my green-glassed chest. So my feet muck onwards, and my fingers like comb teeth come down to join them.

         Together they sift and feel for seashells, search for brightly colored pebbles that used to cause a lot of pain. They stir up the silt, cutting their connection to my leaky eyes with pillowy clouds, with the confusion of endless possibility. Then I taste less pain in my achy heart and the confusion creeps up to my creaky throat and runny nose like wide, gravelly reflux. Gravelly and solid because it's a conglomerate. It's so dull and slow and indistinct that it feels fixed, but it's creeping wide and spreading. I tumble forwards at a slightly left angle until a shooting pain in my toe brings me welcome relief.

          I stop somersaulting. The toestub is unexpected, but it's real and shooting and well worth the discomfort. As my injured foot wiggles to feel at the offending object, I am already living the glorious, sweeping sorrow and tender throbs and twinges of the lost and neglected and forgotten and incomplete. My comb teeth plunge like salad grabbers toward the discovery; they scrape the surface but I can’t pick it up. The surface is rough like sandpaper but slippery with moss and soft stringy seaweed and I even feel a barnacle. It fits perfectly underneath my folded hands, but it's heavy. It’s downright unmovable. I sit down in front of it and try to dig it out, but it doesn't loosen, and suddenly I realize that it's the tip of an iceberg. Suddenly I realize that I won't see it. I stroke the seaweed and scratch the rough surface til I feel its grit under my fingernails. Then I stand up and leave the treasure for the Lost Boy.

         As I wander the lagoon I see a fireplace poker. It's hanging out of a tree that's weeping into the swamp. I go and touch the tree. Its skin is cold and dark and wet, like the nose of the poodle whose feet touch the floor of my room. The tree is hard and dense and it doesn't feel alive the way the drowsy hot tears of the lagoon feel alive.

         But I know that it's living. It's the slowest heaviest thing and it can't be lifted, it's so slow that you can't feel it when you touch it. So I feel the most when I touch it, the most empty space of all. It's so empty that I can lie down in it and stretch out my arms and my legs and my head and my hip without bumping into any feet.

         It's Spring Cleaning so I grab the fireplace poker and wade through the swamp. I poke at the various litter, I skewer it on the poker like a kebab. I pick up the empty beer bottles and eroding soda cans and mossy carpets and soppy cardboard. The kite strings and gumps of decaying leaves and tangles of cut fishing lines whose sinkers snagged twigs that drag whole beds of algae. I pick them up and look at them and move into them; I move through them, I move them and make space. I turn the bottles and cans upside down and hold them as their insides pour out. I hold them the way a parent holds the head of a child who’s vomiting. I look through all the vomit for treasures, I poke through all the sand until I find an empty snail shell that’s full of sand. When I pour out the sand it’s so empty that I feel it living. I lie down in it, I recline into the snail shell and stretch out. I lose myself until I’m back in my room, and I go to bed.