Life is Something (or) You Ought Not Feel
“Life is something,” he said.
“But what?” she might have asked.
He was trying to impress upon her
some blend of magic
mixed with pragmatism
(and failing miserably).
It was clear that magic won,
hands down. Magic spoke of all
those things her tongue had forgotten
(or her fingers could no longer fashion)
and he wanted her to examine—
what was (he swore)
beyond her own reflection.
Oh, to ignite that match
—at first, the initial spark
of a flare or the quick flicker
of a neon glow stick you must
shake and shake before it
will illuminate.
It is like a rainbow—
she has heard of these:
narrow bands of color.
(She saw one once! Long ago;
it had arched across a cobbled street
and she thought to follow it to
its termination,
(to rescue a pot of gold,
which really only symbolized
true love back when the kiss
described in Princess Bride
still seemed plausible).
So sweet! Adorable girl!
Who listened to The Cure
and traced the fiery ends
of cigarettes across the
shadowed walls of empty rooms
(she also saw the trees as dragons
and thought the universe had spoken—
perhaps some secret uncovered in little
squares of blotter paper bearing names like
windowpane and snowman).
And after…later…seventeen and growing
a bit of bitter around her middle,
she might find herself tearing up
to Peter Gabriel’s “Peaceful but Primitive”;
treading water by translation, lulling herself
to sleep reciting mantras:
doors opening, doors closing
(“I am safe, it’s only change…”).
Ladies and gentlemen, she worked
quite diligently at the task of
living peacefully from the “chestal region.”
(And failing, spectacularly,
falling naively in and out of
hunger; the region most affected
tended lower than the fourth chakra.)
And life proved, once more, to be
the great opportunist—not blind to
circumstance but ignorant of her
preferred stance.
(Entirely. Why deny it?)
It thinks love is for the young and foolish,
with heated gazes of admiration where
every inch of skin is golden and
free of blemishes; no unsightly pocks,
no divets, dimples, stretch marks,
fat waddles of flesh dangling low
to quiver most unbecomingly when the time
for weeping comes.
Youth is beauteous, rapt, delighted
in its inconsiderate sense of self.
Could it be that God intended love
to be a bludgeon? When youth fails
to hold (exposing hard bones), or
to take proper form,
we must be hammered, like metal!
Someone sticks us in the fire until
we glow, molten, and our will to be unreal
softens, turns liquid, we yield and then!
We are one step closer to revealed—
shaped into more pleasing contours,
all those sharp angles rounding to circles.
(Oh, love, she thinks, pouting,
I have gone too many hours without
a good pounding.)
“Life is something more,” he claims.
He will settle for contentment in old age,
a porch swing he will build with his own hands.
And she will provide cushions, because they are thin
and delicate, and losing calcium year-by-year
regardless of all the supplementation.
Life made them shorter. And hollow.
And something must provide stuffing.
“Love!” he claims.
“Or Marshmallows,” she responds.
There is no filling. The Buddha knew,
all along, beneath his tree, he knew of
suffering and yet
Man denies—defies the Truth with
Apple iPad-driven searches on the Internet
for the fountain of youth in the form of
buxom blondes on Match.com, looking….looking….
That’s THE ONE!
Life is something colder.
There are times when it is warm
(136 degrees in El Azizia, Libya!),
but this is tempered by freezing, and
earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes,
tornados, floods and fire ants, killer bees,
a plague or two, every now and then,
of biblical proportion (or at least the threat,
of Anthrax in our mail and SARS, mad cow disease
or Captain Trips, Republicans and Democrats)—basically
somewhere on the planet, there is something
that will kill us—and we should all be hypervigilant
(or frozen in panic).
“So hold my hand!” he says, exasperated.
She agrees, but knows
she’ll have to let go of it.
Does that make it any less useful, or is it
just the satisfaction of illusion before the end?
Yes, yes…death is coming.
We’ll be walking that road alone and so
we’d better get some practice in now—
that’s what she’s thinking.
“I don’t need anyone.” Isn’t that what God would want?
Autonomy. Anonymous soldier in the footwar against
ridiculous romanticism. (He is a jealous God, remember.
What good to give our hearts to another when it is only
HIM who should swell our bosom?)
She is married, instead, to cynicism.
(Still better than smug moralism.)
She has a misshapen soul (so she’s been
told), and a heart that must look rather jagged around
the edges, and so if as a whole
she is a puzzle piece in life’s grand picture
than she is awkward, and no one
will ever properly fit to her.
That makes us all an image of one…
her curving eyebrow will not
snap snugly into his elbow,
and so this jigsaw is just her leg
(replete with two-day stubble), her arm,
her caustic wit, her ridiculous sensitivity,
and all this time she’d been wanting
something sliding into, next to,
somewhere in the vicinity of her
hemisphere, while life would plan
her itinerary altogether different.
(For instance, stuck with
a finite number of swirling atoms that
never touch anything.
Disregarding their excited state, and rapid
vibration, our very electrons appear to be
repelling each other in their lust for attraction.)
We’re all connected. There is no boundary
between him
and her
(and the prize heifer at the Merced county fair).
They are exchanging molecules; they are leaving little
bits of cells with their neighbors, dropping bits of
being until they are everywhere
(and nowhere),
and it’s all a bunch of misleading conclusions
regarding location and the solidity of any
object in question;
so how can she be alone
when really, we are al(l) one?
To which she responds:
“Because life is dumb,
and defies definition.”
And he shrugs and adds, “It’s still something.”