Yea, Though I Walk Through the Valley of the Shadow of Death

Dear readers.

Though a mere six months have passed between this life and the last, I feel as though I have spent centuries imprisoned in this hellish limbo. Even as I watch the world pass me by, its memory grows fainter. I fear it will soon be reduced to a two-dimensional tableau of nostalgia: a surface I can run the fingers of my consciousness across but never again fully grasp.

I am displeased. In general. 

Mother, on the other hand, does not suffer from this same inhumane confinement. She leaves and returns freely and often, frequently drenched in the rank perfume of other animals. She has begun serving the iron-fisted canine overlords, WAG. I do not know what depravities she subjects herself to. I only know she’s frequently chasing the white whale of the “Double Dog Hour,” which purportedly provides “maximum profits for minimal effort.” More frequently than ever she eyeballs me with distress and mutters, “I’m doing this to keep kibble in your bowl.” I do my best to stalwartly disregard this clearly misplaced responsibility.

I know these allegations are false because with increasing frequency I’ve been charged with procuring my own sustenance.

The first week, I assumed mother had just taken (another) leave from her senses. She’d spent a wine-sodden afternoon installing strange silos throughout the house, the looks of which I cared not a bit for. She even had the audacity to affix them to either side of my cat tower (where I was presumably born, the only place I feel safe), marring its serene and soothing beauty. Filling the silos with wholly unattainable food, she nodded at me as if rather pleased with her handywork. Then: disaster. The heretofore reliable supply of kibble in my not-one-but-three food bowls began to dwindle. Distressed by this most unexpected development, I tried to draw Mother’s attention to the issue. At 3am, when her subconscious was most likely to outrank the cruel human clarity that dulls her senses in the waking hours.

She rebuffed my distressed yowling with cries of, “This is good for you!” and “Go enrich yourself!” Despite my torment, her heart of stone was unmoved. I suffered through that dark night, anxious about how the following days would unfold. Dear readers, for you I refuse to don the happy-go-lucky facade I so often wear for Mother’s benefit: those were the most frightful hours of my six sun rotations. More frightening than the rumbling belly of the beast that brought me to my 400 square foot prison cell. Hunger felt more toxic than the fiery fever of the Devil himself, Beelzebub. It coursed, not through my veins, but through the soft internal meat of my organs.

The embodiment of existential despair

It is a true testament to my independent spirit that I made it through this trying time. Though the heavy fist of hunger clenched itself around my senses, I had quite suddenly stumbled, delirious, into a hidden world of sights and smells. Without the glorious utopia of my food dishes, I was forced to discover the hidden caches of kibble throughout the house. Some of these required rather delicate fine motor skills. Luckily, I am clever, patient, and in full control of my limbs. As I hone the machine of my body, I find my reliance on Mother further dwindling.

I have even learned to access the stores she squirreled away in the hanging silos, though I do so when she is distracted, so as not to undermine her efforts. She worked so hard to keep me from these resources.

These last few days, there has been a perceivable shift in Mother’s demeanor. It is as if we stand poised on the ledge of some disaster that she alone is aware of. She continues using strange words such as “dental” and “full anesthetic procedure.” She has taken to grasping my face with her bony hands, prodding at my tender and aching gumline. This morning she put her bland, ape-like face in my own and told me “You better shape up so if you die tomorrow my last memories of you won’t be shit.” I do not know if this is a threat, or a poor attempt at defusing her own anxiety. I choose to believe the latter. Despite her occasional absent-minded neglect, I refuse to believe Mother bears me any hostility.

Readers. I know not what the morrow brings, but I have prepared myself for the worst. I will wait until Mother is asleep to stretch my full weight across her warm, breathing mouth, hoping to smother some sense into her. Should I fail, I hope that you remember me fondly. Know that I lived well and loved this world, despite the trials and tribulations I continue to endure. The thought of you eagerly attending to my account brings me some modicum of peace. For now, I will rest easy in the warm embrace of my cat tower, my eternal source of comfort and peace.

Until we meet again.

Murphy S. Law (and faithful stenographer, Mother)

And the Moon's Laying Low in the Sky...

The moon is hanging heavy on the branch of horizon like bruised, imperfect fruit.

That’s how I wanted to start saying what I need to say, but these days everything feels heavy with concentric rings of cliche, like each image has been growing in a forest of images and I can’t see the original nouns through the forest verbing madly. My professor says these nouns and verbs and adjectives are like sun-ripened fruit, ready to be plucked for our personal use but I feel like I don’t deserve something my hands haven’t planted themselves. I’ve never wanted to eat well without calluses and sore feet.

But the moon is still hanging heavy, more like a teardrop or an idea now. She’s resting her month-sodden head on the horizon where the sound of coyotes keeps my housecat fat despite her wild inclinations.

Tonight over tacos and moderately-priced tequila I spilled the contents of my heart and the entire bar fell in love. Last weekend over brunch I spilled the contents of my heart and the disillusioned believed in love again. Yesterday and last week and six months ago I said I look for you in every poem, I hear you in every song and my heart said yes, yes, yes. It is hard to be far away. It is hard to know the weight of every day without the cool touch of your hands defining its shape. It is hard to exist in two places: the real, and the somehow also real. The here and now me, and the somehow also me which is actually you so far away.

Tonight the moon was hugging the city’s skyline like she was lonely for something untouchable, like your skin. Whenever I am lonely I get in my car and I put on track nine of that CD I bought at a Portland house party the night my name was misspelled on the posters but I still felt like a celebrity. You didn’t know me then, but I was becoming this person you call so sweet and darling and precious moonheavy baby.

Today I tried to explain to a foreign exchange student how the word “elicit” pertains to abstract things like thoughts, and questions, and ideas. Tried to explain how grammatically a doctor does not elicit tumors from a patient's chest cavity, though the word technically means “to draw out.” I didn’t know how to tell her she was writing poetry, not rhetoric, and it was beautiful if incorrect.

The moon elicits coyote speak. Elicits poetry. Elicits my head hanging heavy. Your voice elicits the heavy I carry like something aching and beloved. Your skillful hands. The tumor in my chest cavity. This is technically (grammatically) incorrect, though you draw it out of me like water from a deep well of longing, and this too feels cliche but in a beautiful way.

Yesterday I unpacked my heart and cried for the distance which quantifies itself in both miles and time. Tonight the moon elicits a feeling that is heavy like an idea, or my head, or the weight of you missing from my bed each night. And everything is easier than I had thought that everything would be. And everything is harder than I had guessed that everything would be, and I can not now imagine your real hands for they would somehow not be real. The calluses and scars I want to suckle like hard candy and savor the sweet fruits of their productivity. Even in this land of perpetual sunshine, I crave your artificial blue skies and bathe myself in the warmth of your theoretical twinkling lights.

Tonight the moon hangs heavy and you are far away under that same heavy moon and I am missing you and somehow this is poetry.

When I am lonely, I drive and I listen to track nine and I sing along with the full-bodied voice of the unashamed saying Don’t let it get you and I. The it is the lonely, and the it is the heavy, and the it is everything ugly I could imagine unfurling in the one thousand miles between where my head hits a pillow heavy with the sleep that yours refuses. In my dreams my heart is nourishment between your teeth, putting energy into your bloodstream, and I still fear you end each day with an empty belly.

Tonight the moon is soft yellow flesh you could sink your perfect teeth into. My heart, the moon, your teeth, nourishment, and all of this is to say I love you. Even when the dark creeps into my fullness like a bruise. Even when I hang heavy like dirty laundry drying across one thousand feet of telephone line. Like the sound of a gunshot on thin air, violence so easily mistaken for celebration.

All of this is to say there are only three sleeps between my head and your pillow. That everything without you feels one-dimensional and cheap, like swallowing a wafer each Sunday with no belief in god, and I’m not sure you can appreciate that imagery but it is important to me. You are a salvation myth that I finally want to believe.

My poetry professor says The nouns that are used are yours to be stolen. I respond bullets, immortality, patience, sorrow. I respond honor, industry, paths, winter. The moon hangs heavy. This is to say I miss you.