What we do we do
we do we do
this regeneration
it ain’t for the weak boned
this revision, life, revisited
the spring rain drains
into the sump pit and thus
beginning again
the water keeps running
and so do I
and so do I
and so do I
I do I do I do
She has inherited my heart, I think. And so I may have to teach her to fight.
I was taught to fight my heart, this loneliness that nothing fixes, even happiness. They tried, anyway. My mother encouraging gentleness. My father demanding discipline. I tried teaching these lessons that I had not learned well to my daughter the same way. It worked out as well as anyone could expect.
The loneliness. People often misunderstand the word. Loneliness. I am loved and seen and embraced and fortunate in that regard. But people are driven by primal urges the way diesel drives the steam engines on old riverboats. It radiates out, like a leaky oil can. Some are driven by love. Some by anger. Some by sadness. There are others. And then there are those of us driven by an impossible loneliness. It’s being a room full of people and not connecting to any of them. It’s being in a room full of family and friends and feeling rudderless. It’s being alone on a city sidewalk and drifting in and out traffic. It’s waking up each morning and having to remind yourself that even loneliness can be a blessing, and what a wonder it is when there is one person who can see through the mist to the heart the bleeds and wants and needs and loves and sometimes needs the loneliness, too. It sometimes drives people away without meaning to.
But it takes time to master and there are pitfalls. It’s easy to try and fill the loneliness with things. It never works.
I had to learn to fight. My daughter did, too. Her daughter has inherited our heart, I think. And I think I will try teaching her differently. That sometimes, it’s ok to fight. Especially when the world is wrong. Because the heart never is.
I relish the days I wake up with a cleanish slate. All I want before I first open my eyes is to feel her next to me. Around her, my entire geography takes form and becomes. And then the words, and then the noisy insistence of the day, the dogs, the words, one foot and then the next foot, finding glasses and on to coffee and tobacco and words. The world, the world, fast and faster, slow and slower, becomes and unbecomes, folds and unfolds
before the machinations
interfere. But that
is rare.
I feel for her to make sure I’m still waking into the same dream. Always the sensation in my limbs, the vestiges of dreams incomplete when the body has enough, when the mind that is me today decides to drive the body machine. The static from the back of the brain tunes in like an old radio dial, finds a station that rings clear and all I can hope for some days
is that it’s a song: The Beatles or Lucinda Williams or The Bangles or Stone Temple Pilots or Lita Ford or Joe Strummer or [ ]
and not some news reel
that will bleed horror in the lens
before I even get my coffee and my first smoke of the day.
