Inability

I told a friend the other day that there was a time I wanted to talk about all the things I knew how to do better than anybody else and be recognized for it. I’d write the poetry that would somehow, organically catapult me into a limelight that would keep revealing how much I knew about how to heal the world with a repetition only water understands how to wear down the shape of, an invisible absence my memories could never find me in, if I were to eventually understand what it truly meant to let go and be present. Then one day, the unexpected happened. I realized I no longer made sense to myself. For all the oneness I felt I could not uncoil my bottomless oubliette of a tongue, nor keep it from flat-worming the rhythm of sense out of my brain. I felt like a chicken with his head cut off.

Which reminds me. My grandfather once told me the story of how he used to axe the head away from chickens and watch them run around, trying to get away, bumping into the wood pile, the well, the stump, your leg, jumping up onto the hay bails, life spaghetti sauce spattering out of its flower of a neck. He thought it funny, how this stooge of a thing seemed to bump around for Moe and Larry, how totally incognizant of a past it appeared to want to reconnect with, the thing would slowly just wind down, like it was on its last liter of battery acid.

I guess this is, in a way, what I ended up telling to my friend, that no matter how much I like to think I know about how to run around a life without needing to know how, even though now I find it much more worthwhile to talk about how I don’t know what I mean half the time, each confession kind of bringing me back that much closer to understanding what it means to want the glimmering edge of a moment to find me, it’s the fact I don’t know how to keep my life from running out that’s a pain in the neck.