when we push it

The vibration shakes me in the night, and when it comes I know. I pull my carriage upright, like sinking in water, but reverse. The cab gives it's honk and I duck into black seats. The driver is tired and something in me wants to offer his importance.  "A baby is coming."  He smiles, squinting through the rearview, and then a plucked forehead - ("Yes?")

He flies through the night, sleeping villages below the bridge; I look down at my watch, and out to passing lights. The sound of spinning tires, a slit of window pulls the night through my nose.

Soft and easy come the brakes, the home looks quiet, curtains drawn. The driver stares up at it in wonder, and we both marvel at things unknown.  I am in love with this moment, for it terrifies my heart, I feel it in my eyes like love mixed with pain - the second of reckoning I face my truest self.  And I wonder about courage, of patience and calm.  I ask myself how I got here, and what I know of pain.

I slip through the door, to find her standing in the bathtub. Liquid running down her legs, shaking, and I pause in the doorway to wait. She rocks her hips and looks me in the eye. The room is glowing, her vibration fluttering the walls.  She permeates the orchestra of creaking floorboards and cracked ceiling. There are women all around, and a papa so in love, carrying water, bringing towels, offering tea, making food. We begin pulsing to her rhythm, on a ship swaying to the impenetrable ocean. She moves into the water and we enter with her, seven imaginary bodies beside her, she is never alone.

And when she begins to push it, she grabs hold of me tightly. Her heart is my heart and I am in it like nothing I have ever known. The smell of birth and death together, there is blood, so much blood. Her sounds are getting lower, she is groaning, calling out. In a moment of panic, or perhaps a final invigoration, she arches upright, reaches down, and pulls the babe from her body. There are sighs, and cheering, tears dripping softly into water. I sink back, just a little, to make way for her moment. I slip silently into wallpaper, and inhale the room. I leave after dawn has long since passed, and when my feet hit the porch, I finally cry.

in the beginning...

Last night I rambled along a hushed and steamy bus in the rain, quiet, tired, piano in my ears.  Quite abruptly, like some intangible darkness in my guts, I was hit by the sudden realization of why I am doing this.  Hopping a jet to never return, one-way; LEAVING.  I thought it was because I had such a profoundly broken heart I couldn't see myself healing it in the midst of the vibrating winds of home, sitting on the same old porch, like a goose.  I thought it was because I needed to create something even BIGGER, just for myself, so I could heal the confusion of what seemed a remorseless con-act (as I imagined the Universe laughing in great, roaring, star-shuddering hysterics).  But what came to me, whispering in my ear, direct from that inconsolable seed of self that resides hibernating, drooling, ready to strike up the viola of cruelest truth, was the knowledge that something inside me had died.  

THERE HAD BEEN A DEATH HERE, AND I HADN'T EVEN KNOWN IT - a belief in things I will never understand - unexplainable orchestrations of time and space had filled the galaxy of my whole life, a strange and fantastical storybook I had built around me, the curious ways in which I seemed to have always been carved the clearest path, my heart answering to some unspoken god inside myself I didn't dare pointing to or acknowledging outloud, sending me, express-trained, to strangers and friends and lovers out of what seemed an infinite web of what can only ever be called magic.  What a laughing stock I've become, I thought.  What a fool I must seem.  Nothing is real, the world is cruel, and you are lost.  

Stupid.  So fucking stupid.

There has been a death, and I am not quite sure what I want to do about it, I thought.  Sing a dirge?  I had already done that.  Pointlessly.  Throw my fists into something hard and loud, and bleed a bit?  Maybe just go get so drunk I could dance myself sick with the energy of just passing it through.  My eyebrows became sorely bent angles (and oh, poor hands that covered the face from tears shown to unconsenting riders!), causing me to see my own reflection in the window droplets - fingers, steam, and spit.  God help me.   

I need to write.

I have needed to write, really WRITE, since the years of hiatus I took up spent in mental conversation, waffling, distracting, arguing, creating so many projects I can't even remember them all now (because I didn't WRITE them down) - good and wonderful exploits necessary and proud, but none resolved, recorded, sewn - in word. Writing has ever only been my truest sanctuary, my dearest love, the sweetest breast upon which to lose myself endlessly.  

And so begins a kind of journey.  Back but forward.  And I'm going to dig for bones.