Your Broken Is My Whole

I feel as though I have cracked open my skin and found my dead twin crammed up into my lymph node.  I feel like I'm driving on a country road at night and everything I've ever buried is drifting into my headlights and it's a miracle that I haven't totaled my Vespa yet.  Perhaps it's because I keep listening to Pavarotti singing with rock stars I don't even like and am finding something of the elusive charm in this train wreck of worlds- dancing smoothly through the octaves like a well rehearsed ballerina who hasn't succumbed yet to the Snickers bars and Cokes.  Fresh innocent joy.

Though I have said five thousand times that I don't buy into the "innocence" franchise because it's as corrupt as God and Country. 

Music is the only way out of it all.

Pavarotti singing "'O Sole Mio" with Bryan Adams is as delicious and delightful as eating fresh peas off the vine in the blinding heat of the angry summer sun and then running on gangling legs back to shade.  It's exactly like that.

I feel strangely right.  Though I've never felt quite as alone as I do right now.  Alone amidst many.  Alone though I have so much.  I am only beginning to understand this insatiable hunger, this untenable loneliness as the condition of my birth.  I am only just beginning to understand there are no band aids large enough to cover them.  There is no food rich enough to stave off the emptiness.  It simply exists as a function of who I am.  Extant.

Extant.

For me to be broken I had to have been whole at some point, which I never was.  If I was born broken then broken is my whole.

You learn to miss what you never had because other people point it out to you constantly.  You learn to recognize your missing legs because people with legs are always looking at where yours might have been, had you ever had them.  But if you never had legs then there is no actual memory of legs and all the ambulatory freedom they bring to those who have them.  You learn to desire feet where there has only been air but it's abstract because feet are meaningless to the person who has never had legs. 

There can be no ghosts where no bodies have been.

I am beginning to get it and the truth, sadly, won't set me free, because I live amongst humans.

However, I am less afraid now than I was before.  Less afraid of what I'll never be, what I'll never have, what I'll never accomplish, what I'll never say, what I'll never want, and what I'll never understand.

The things "I'll-never" will be legion.  I won't balance my life well because I am not a balanced person and this is my normal.  This is my whole.  I will always be standing on the ledge with my freak banner flying.  I will always be on the verge of jumping.  Not because I want to make you mad, not because I want to scare you, or worry you, or bum your summer out...it actually has nothing to do with you at all.  It's because the ledge is where I live. 

I crack open fresh peas from the vine to add to my caramelized onions in the saute pan and it feels like the very best thing on earth, giddy like first love, delicious like lust, fresh like the first three feet of snow in winter.  I have an incredible joy rising up with laughter, ridiculous, choking on itself, and I'm shouting the words to 'O Sole Mio because I can't sing for shit but I'm so full of this music for the moment, it becomes my matter, my everything, and there is more light in it than I can hold.  I throw the peas into the pan and they brighten and become sweeter. 

I will become completely empty in another few minutes so I enjoy this feeling while it lasts.  Carpe Diem!  Sing the poets - say the truth!  Tomorrow we could all be dead! 

This work is endless.  It frightens me how much of the rest of my life I'm going to be spending carving away the extraneous, tidying up the verbs, adjusting my adjectives to sound less like a kid writing a fan letter, and to tone down the expletives.  It is huge. 

When I was ten and I was sitting in bed with my thousand typed sheets strewn in chaos around me, my fingers working feverishly at such important things like listing names I might need to use for my "characters", it never occurred to me for one second that this wasn't what I was "supposed" to be doing.  It was everything.  My miserable little FM radio playing classical music all day long, and me-shedding typing paper like blood, I opened my veins to the words, I invited them in to a banquet so fine, so rich with iron, so full that I could filtch the over flow and transcribe the crazy conversations through ink and bark. 

On hindsight there couldn't possibly be more dull work than the pedantic sketchings of my ten year old imagination, but I think it's rather sweet that I was so earnest.  It used to make me want to die, my earnestness.  I have had to come to terms with it, because it set up camp in my heart and never left.  I am always so fucking earnest.  I can either be so embarrassed I want to cut off my arms to spite my head, or I can just get over it.

I don't understand when people are joking a lot of the time, even though I do it all the time myself, between long bouts of earnestness.  I now understand that this is what leads people to believe devoutly that I am naive.  Which never, NEVER, ceases to piss me the fuck off.

I am coming to realize that this camouflage* of mine has been necessary.  I am able to shout across the universe that I have a soul so black it can suck your sunlight up in less than one second and everyone nods, smiling, saying "Oh yes, hon, yes, we know." as though they thought what I really said was "I fart unicorns and purple stars!" and they were all so glad.  They were all so happy they brought out enough cupcakes to sustain Stalin's army.

This reminds me of the hilarious recordings of traditionally happy music (like 'O Sole Mio, for example) by The Red Army Chorus which spreads such a heavy heart over joy that even I have a hard time competing with it.

I understand at last that no matter how much I write, here, there, elsewhere, there will always be so much more.  It is my purgatorial hunger.  It is my loneliness reaching out for human touch; my loneliness whose appetite is unquenchable.  If I could I would devour you.  I would subsume you.  I would drink you.  I would taste you.  I would spread you on toast and find out if you compliment wheat.  I would write poems about you.  I would bronze you.  I would be your best friend.  But never mistake this- my hunger has no bottom. 

I am coming to understand that much of my social life is a calculated game of me protecting everyone from myself. 

As if to make a lie of everything I've just said, I also want to give everything I am to you.  There is no corner of my spirit I wouldn't offer up to you with a bit of cheese and a good flagon of wine.  There is nothing I don't want for you.  My love has no bottom, like my hunger.  If you need a kidney I will cut mine out and give it to you on Depression glass.  If you need a jar of my wonderfully fragrant canned vanilla pears to stave off your sorrows I will give you five.  I will let you feast on me when we are both freezing on the desolate snowy passes of the Cascades.  When you bleed I will use my own marrow to staunch the flow.  I will give you all of my words if only it will give you courage.  I will feed you fresh peas and fresh fava beans on pasta to give you the strength to speak your peace, your love, your spirit because this is so much less creepy than everything else I might give to you.

At last, here at the end of the evening, at the close of your own sleep, (during which I have been writing all of this) there is one thing that we can all rejoice in together, that we can agree on, that we can share- the ephemeral beauty and sweetness of peas picked fresh from our gardens today which are like delicate drops of green desire.





*This is the first time I have ever spelled this word correctly on the first go.  I am so full of self pride.  I'm so impressed with myself.