Into the fluorescent-lit night, my blood elopes with hospital vials, needles nipping in the crooks of my elbows, sucker punches of bruises, putrid-yellow. Pain’s caged animal gnaws at my skull, thumps. I’ve lost the key to let it out. “I’d cut a door for you, if I could!” I cry.
Numbness. Bricked-up land, at which hours crookedly coil and gallop. Something sinister seethes in the trio of clock hands, and swaddled in chasms of a labyrinth, sleep is yanked from your eyelids, alabaster.
I walk from the hospital’s yawning lobby, gulping swallows of autumn, tufts of wafer-thin gauze ghosting at warm flesh once furrowed with IV lines. Summer had departed, a third story suicide in the northern hemisphere’s celestial asylum.
Once home, slow cooked crock-pot feasts; from great aunts, a cocoon of quilts and crocheted afghans, sleeping beneath the autumnal empyrean. Primary colors, orchards, soft-edged squares, pushing at the phantoms of memory.
Roaming misty lands, I wept the tears of the sun, cupping a swan glazed mug of tea, satin for tongues. Wrinkles of rain braiding rivulets on collarbones; in a bathrobe, a book of poems, hemmed in-between my ribcage and elbow.
Behold the tender wolves in the wood thrush, and jaws agape at the apostle’s trust. Nay, not the primrose road, but through the thorny bush.
Oh, blessed, blessed one. It is struggle that spoon-feeds strength. If you are never thrown to the depths, how dull the magnificence of a mountain crest. May the crowns of our heads be anointed with hardships, and with the purest of joys. Our bodies will be poor, but oh, how rich our souls!
Struggle is the sculptor, if you coddle yourself from the bite of its chisels, you will never be sculpted into the magnum opus you could of been, and what true tales of triumph will you tell at the banquet table?
We’ve been breathing by ventilators society intubated in us. Awake from the coma of a carbon clone, of cursory. Breathe, enlightenment.
By the skin of our teeth, we’ll be alright.
P.S. I am founding an invitation only writers' society. The project is only in its chrysalises stage, although you can read a rough summary of its premise here, and I hope for it to be a full fledged being, by Christmas.
P.P.S. Another thing, unrelated to the first: I suspect my entries can be a bit redundant. It’s just that my foundations sometimes suffer earthquakes, and in my humanity, I need to be reminded of these things again and again. And so, I write about them.
Title Quote: Oscar Wilde
Photo & Art Credits: (1, 2, 6) Natalie Kucken, (3, 8) Misma Andrews, (4) Parker Fitzgerald, (5) Nishe, (7) Gabriella Barouch, (9) Matias Santa Maria, (10, 11) Alison Scarpulla.
