Overcast mornings of Russian blue, when the dew wishes it had legs to dance from the blade tips of grass that is just thankful to have the weight of the droplets on their backs. I feel like brown grass. Not the grass that has died. Not the grass that is burnt. I feel like the grass that lays dormant underneath the cover, never really tasting the sun; the grass that is seen when the blade goes too low.
This is my favourite time of the year, the most wonderful time of the year. These cold fall mornings when I think back to colder mornings of earlier times when boarding the big yellow bus was a pleasure, a day of unknown anticipation. These days, I get so nervous about that promenade that my stomach balls up like the yarn of a cat ball.
Tangled like drag queen hair, tortured like Siberian visages. The unknown is more unknown than it ever could want to be in it’s most wicked of dreams haunting old men who hold tight, in death grips, the last memories before the Alzheimer’s really takes a bite.
I’ve read too much. I sleep too light. I awake to worried. I need to become Alfred E. Nuemann. He never worried and I am quite sure he slept deep and hard. He probably was illiterate.
I went to partake in my habit of coffee and a cigarette. I stood tall on my porch as if to threaten the World to make the day okay, to make the day safe, to have the following hours harbour good tidings. Manic bird chirps chiseled into my ear drum like drunken Lilliputian jackhammers. When I exhaled the first drag the sky became darker and more foreboding. I could tell, somehow, that the sky was mad at me. Maybe the sky likes reading my political scribbles, the ones that should be here, the ones that I have not maintained like I should have as of recent days. The heavenly blanket - a fan of Essayists. Ah, what a dream world I live in.
Like a Slinky pinch of the skin while playing at the bottom of the stairs, I know it is time to ascend back to the top. To suck on the knuckle of skin flap reddened by the metal coil's bite and begin the trek back to the start of the game before the Slinky got mad at sedation and offered a voice of violence to inspire the movement once more.
Days are passing by too quickly in slow motion and making for a muddled mess of what right now is and could be. It makes arriving at the door step of the day an unwanted procedure of door bell ringing and solicitation to follow. I fear the closing door. To go back with more cookies or raffle tickets than I started with or to be robbed of the money before I could make it back to the authoritarian who holds the currency envelope of thick goldenrod, and even thicker flap glue, refuge. Like walking backward underwater, you always wonder where you are going and never take time to surface and breathe. Do lemmings drown if they fall into water or do they swim to the shore and climb high up to the lip of another cliff with only rocks below?
‘Do you want fries with that?’, oh God, the horror. I fear it so much that exclamation points would pass along the wrong inflection, the wrong mood, the wrong point; so I leave out the stem and end with a period.
Why does the camel never break the straw’s back? Why don’t people ever exclaim that things 'never' happen for a reason and that solace is to be found in the chaos and random nature of it all? What if you awoke and found that not only do you have nothing but you lost your health as well, would you still have your health but it would just be in bad shape, rode hard and put away wet? It all is a matter of time, time changes, to every thing turn … The bucket of clichés has a leak, someone please contact Liza and get her to fix it.
It would feel so much better to just sleep away a day, sleep it away and make it wish I were awake. We always hope for the weather to go our way, and as I type that the sky pisses down it’s pelting fury outside my window as if to tell me to ‘shut up’. What does the weather wish for? Probably the lack of confusion between ‘weather’ and ‘whether’, that’s what I think; but then again, what do I know?
The rain to me is a comfort. It assures me the day will be dark, the day will be soft, the day will make noise. I often think that ‘day’ is too bright sounding of a word to use when the weather is poor. We need a better word, another word, one more word for people to misuse and confuse. I am quite sure that there is a tribe somewhere, who will never ever read this, that has two words for the day. I need to find that tribe. I hope they are hiring.
The rain is pounding so hard that it looks like Styrofoam popping white as it bounces back up from the tarmac in the parking lot. The water is so repulsed by the black tar that it repels itself back up to whence it came. Is the rain just homesick and fallen so fast, so intensely, that it did not have time to process it’s impending splatter death? When it just sprinkles the droplets must glide and sway back and forth on their way down, is it slow enough to contemplate the end and come to terms with what will inevitably happen upon reaching the warm soil of Earth? The thrill seekers as rockets, the profound pontificators as feathers; the rain. The thunder does it’s thing and the lightening dances too. Today will be wet. I wish I could have slept longer. I wish I were the rain.
I have one cup of coffee left. I need to smoke a smoke a smoke a smoke …
Maybe tonight will be different. Maybe tomorrow will be better.
I wonder if anyone has ever been named May Bea and if so where does she live?
She lives in the hearts of frightened men who watch the rain and hold tight the idea of not being afraid of tomorrow.
She is the mid-western Goddess of hope, the Matriarch of promise.
Too bad she doesn’t live closer to me and the rain storm …
