saturday morning

There is a wind blowing that I want to turn into a cliché about change and atmospheric pressure and storms. How lazy is that? Why not focus smaller, see the way the fronds from the Chinese fan palm click together like snapping fingers in a forest full of applause? Or the way the hair falls across your face when you look down, sheltering your eyes when it is too painful to look into mine? Or too honest? Easier to note the way that you stand, and turn to go.

Cliché. I want to fall back on you, write silly genre pieces that won't disturb anyone for long, leave your impressions of me intact, leave you untouched in anyplace that matters at all. But I can't. I can't settle for surface tension when beneath the water, deep, deep down there is a current, warm to the touch, steady, strong, that carries me to places you can't see from up there, a current once touched that won't release me until I've found the source of things, and then I am afraid to discover that there is no source of things, that it is all cyclical, circular, hop-on-let's-go-around-again the same.

So I choose. I pick a cliché here, a bud to slip into a crystal vase, a bit of green for contrast and let it be. But it is so lonely.

I awaken aroused, an image behind my eyelids I don't want to let go, Words that I know I need to write down … gentle words from an outlaw that don't belong there, the kind of contrast that makes me stop, listen, beg. I tremble, worried that any one spoken will change the tenuous balance, make you disappear, make you weep.

I don't want to open my eyes. I don't want to see that when I do the cat still lies at the foot of the bed, the dog beneath, each tuned to every movement I make, each guarding that what I do is only that which they can predict. It is too early, they will know that, and all the passion in the world won't matter if I disrupt someone's or something's routine.

There is a storm coming in from the Gulf, and the pressure changes again, the wind chills and I carry the energy of this naked moment with me to the tasks at hand, and all that I know for sure is that change is necessary, change is perfect. And that I owe nothing to the sunrise, and much to the dark.