My Love is a Tiptoe

My sorrow is a doll 

unstitched, or the soft-worn bear 

whose button eye hangs, or threaded smile has fallen unattached 

at the corner.

My compassion is a needle and thread; 

love, looping through
with time and attention.

My resentment is an email 
never sent, but held in draft. 
collected with others like it (but different). Piled like sand castles waiting 
for the waves to round them down, and 
erase them back into flatness. 

My anger is the back pew of a small church, 
a tight throat and careful eyes that watch blood and wafer pass between the hands 
of people more forgiving than I.

My love is a tiptoe 
in a sleeping house, and whispers of 
     please stay
into the ears of the ones who are dreaming. 

Survivor

Come back

And feel that first sign of movement 

where pin-needles and daggers prick

places once rendered numb or discarded. 

Take the first blink

When your eyes cut from a long empty stare and 

sharpen upon territory for which rods and cones 

feel unqualified.

Open your throat

For a deep, staccatoed breath 

that comes after the lungs have emptied and stayed silent and still,

pretending to play dead.

Wake up!

Listen.  And feel yourself shaking awake.

Wake up!

     You are not dead. 

You are found.

Your eyes are blinking,

Your chest is heaving,

The sun is on your face,

Your cheek is on the sand.

Wake up!

And let your heart pound up against you, to tell you that you are alive.

Breathe

And let your lungs draw in the wind, deep, and move you like a sail
back to your feet.

Stand in the place you are found and then

Walk, courageously, along the tide that took you

     and returned you.

Becoming

She does what she loves.  

Most often.  Most days.  That is how her beauty began, out of love. 

When the seed shell broke it was to allow a more authentic layer to come through.  Many times we see this growth on a vertical ladder or a staircase, or horizontally on a winding pathway.  But real growth  begins from inside, pushing its way out.  A rupture of healing, or a soft sloughing away of the things that are dead or dying.  

It is a break in the seal between the soul and the light. 

The cycle is continuous. Even as she grows, unfolding into the wild, she must repeat this: 

Molt like a snake. 

Root like a vine. 

Die and push back out of the cold again after every bad season.  

She must revisit the center over and over again to discern what it is that has always been and what of that must remain. And then she must put that thing out into the light of the sun and the moon, for all the stars and the other wild things to see, because it is the truth. 

The Difficult things

The difficult thing about loving people is losing them. 

I have grieved the deaths of people who are still living.  I wonder how I will manage to walk across rooms and drive. To stir the soup and not set the house on fire, and to find any reason for the smallest pinch of joy when my life is no longer connected to theirs.

The difficult thing about living in general, is its loss.

To get up every day and know that it will end.  Maybe today. Maybe not.
And will the ones you love struggle to stir the soup, too?
Will they have to try to not set the house on fire while they miss you in their bones
and ache with your absence in ways they don’t even know how to tell? 

Inheritance

On Sundays, I am the sponge. 

From the moment I pull up and she is not upstairs waiting to be ushered, but seated in the car, unveiled by the garage door in perfect posture. Red lipstick in place, ready.  Her eyes sparkle like Mrs. Claus, but I am learning better. 

While others mentally sift through the belongings of those they are waiting to die, I am driving her to Sunday School...making a list of other things I want to inherit.  

Not the green couch or the bourbon tumblers. 

The jazz paintings on the wall, or her collection of bibles (well...maybe those I would keep).  

But rather, I wonder how to take pieces of her...of who she is, and wear them like a dress we share. 

Different fit. Different bodies.  

Beauty, autonomy, defiance expressed my way.  Borrowed from her closet. 

2nd Commandment

I bow to too many idols.  

I let them tug at me before light and waking crack open my eyes. 

If I were to measure the amount of time I spend connecting with God and the themes of life that are most meaningful, the tape would run shamefully short alongside the measure of time spent worshipping the woes of my day.  

My scripture comes to me in a live feed connecting me to the smooth surface of an Iphone.  There are people at my fingertips.  Instead of praying, I can reach out like a satellite to receive the messages of others.

 “I need you.  I like you.” 

I swallow it like communion.  

The bad news can be filtered away if it doesn’t suit me, and the holy spirit of social media can sweep in at anytime to bring me offerings of kittens, or stories of others who make me believe I am superior.  I am addicted to my grip on the rocks of judgment.  The power of my thumb and heart is mighty.

God misses me?
Then God should get a facebook profile.  And a blog. Competition is much too steep these days to sit idly by and expect my vote of faith. 

Fear is a vampire

There are days when I can feel it, pressing against the length of my back.

My neck tingles the way it would when I’d remember vampires just before bed and pull the sheet around me, tucking it in at my nape.  Then I would eventually pull my head under too, pinning the fabric at all my edges and across my skull, taut, so that the sheet hovered above me an inch or so, giving me room to echo my breath back at me.  

My eyes would adjust in the dark and cast their own light into the fort I had constructed;
body sized and coffin-shaped.  Sometimes this would make it worse, and I could feel my heart thump against the space; and I would struggle in my stillness until it would go away or exhaustion took me. 

In thirty years I have never seen a vampire.  

At night, sometimes I still pull the sheets taut the same way I did then, to feel the company of my breath in my own face and invite in the fear. I want to experience the belief and danger of then and contrast it against the tepid anguish of today; the manufactured reasons and distractions I give myself to block out the tingle in my neck. 

The muse wants to suck my blood.

But I would rather cut my own self with the searing edge of laundry and homework, and exist in the coffin of constant preoccupation.