the bird

You have not left the cage of my mind.

A bluebird figurine come alive now restless, perhaps a bundle of canary yellow plumage (bright bold as a sunflower), boney wings and feather displays. Circling airborne, round and round, a fury of color, weightlessly ferociously pacing. Constrained yet soaring: the space given. I am amazed at how you soar in a space so small. Soar soar soar! Incessant shifting perspective, your movement, my eyes struggle to keep pace - hear sight taste smell touch cage freedom cage freedom cage - and I wonder if there is any difference at all: (is being caged unknowing of freedom’s burden?) Sometimes, briefly, the cage in my mind is cloaked in an all-too-thin yellowing veil of distracted thought, the shadow of wings and the ferocious trail of fascia muscle air bone blood emerge through shadow from below. Air occupied by swarming, twisting, tumultuous essence. Air within and without. Here and there, air air air. Tornadoes of just-been, not-leaving, and trapping (you’re ceaselessly banging/brandishing/bullying the metal entrapments against my inner cranium, how it rings!) -- dogged dogged trappings. This cage in my mind.

Your mystery is enticing. Words that poured from your mouth, expressing accompanied by gestures (sweet gestures), filling up space within me that I had not known, opening up doors and caverns and spaces smaller than the microvilli, capillaries, hair follicles, only to make me feel, make me believe I AM. And ideas, the ideas you filled me with, the stuff and substance of home. Virginia Woolf words that the difference between happiness and misery is no thicker than a knife’s blade and wondering if us, together, found that blade. Rocking on that blade, blissful for a time, utterly entranced, and cutting us both, severing us from one another, the knife drew it’s miniscule edge, it’s deadly edge, unbeknownst to time, between us. Dragging, penetrating, oh so deeply oh so glacially oh so painfully leaving a wound cavernous; I wonder if it will ever heal.

I know that you will always be part of me.

I am learning to live with this misery (misery!), this agony (this agony!) of not being with you, of wondering how you feel (how do you feel?), wishing for something different than where, who, and how I am now. I could not have been different before, how I wish I could’ve been!

If you still write to me, can I assume that I have some place in your body? That delicate body. That fragile body. That I occupy a space of your being, your soul, your mind, that inner container of ________ (hemming and hawing and oooing and ahhing) that is full of things: devilishly beautiful (so beautiful), wicked (very tremendously vile) things. Gnawing and desperate, clenching, moaning, dancing, talking, reaching, grasping things. Things that, like a hook at the end of a fishing line, yank yank yank out unsuspecting laughter and joy from the basement, up the broken stairs that trail along my spine, hip hop bouncing up up up and out of my being. Eating things, and things that are eaten. eat eat eat. Fluid, restless, anxious, unstoppable things. drink drink drink. Like a child, that lonely child, that person misunderstood, misfitting, unfit, unhappy (so unhappy), desperate, who forges ahead, alone (why alone?), blinders and feelings and telescopes all jammed into a toolkit, that inaccessible toolkit, a person who seeks longs desires with all of being to be loved. Like us all.

Have you ever thought about the feeling of your feet on the floor? The friction that exists, the relentless push of gravity, or is it the pull of the earth? A ceaseless sliding, a holy communion of body and dirt, a false distinction between my atoms and the atoms of an Other. I think of being on the ground, feeling the weight of my being pushed into the ground, and I want that to be We. I want to feel pushed and pulled and wondering and grounded and utterly in motion simultaneously. All - every - each - own - individual - together - none. I want to feel the friction, the joy of being (in a middle place.) Where, between within & through our two bodies/souls/minds, there, there is distinction and freedom, possibility and perspective... Entirely raw raw RAW and UNFORTUNATE ways of Seeing and Being, and just joyously,

openly,

unconditionally

occupying ...

And I wonder if you do, too.

Referenced work:

Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography