Outta’ve Rima

It’s the same day your train switches tracks and comes nose to nose with the southbound car, a slow shudder bumper lick shaking up sleeping passengers: small oomphs of surprised air pushed out of tired lungs on the long haul home after a tense workday – the very same day your boss is escorted by security out of the office for taking unsolicited photos of female staffers.

Exiting the wrong side of the tracks you see, lying still on the train station platform, a woman: big moon face puffy blue and slicked shiny with sweat, strands of dull gray hair caught in the crevices of a worn wrinkled forehead as emergency medical staff pump fists into her chest, begging her – Ma’am, please breath, c’mon ma’am, we need you to breath, while security guards direct gawkers to the farthest exit, yelling irony away: there’s nothing to see here folks, move along now.

It’s the same day you come home to your stale gray concrete 14 story complex, single-serving groceries in hand, cans of tuna for the cat clanging a soft chime soundtrack matched by the percussive rhythm of your dragging footsteps carried on the cracked soles of your swear-I’ll-replace-’em-before-the-snow-flies-toe-worn-through-boots only to find the fire department fishing the metal bed frame belonging to your upstairs neighbour from the bare branches of a gracefully aging birch, bedclothes sad satin streamers sailing toward the icy parking lot, rip-torn 300 count waving surrender for the fight she had with her bully boyfriend the whole night through, snippets of shouts sneaking their way into your dreams despite the pillow pulled tight over sleeping ears.

It’s the same day you think to yourself: it can’t get much stranger than this, no I doubt much it can.

But then life happens.

xoxo

M.L. H’art

The Juggler

This game, it requires many players.

This game, it requires ample time.

This game, it requires strategy.

This game, it will frustrate you.

You will never be good at this game.

In fact, you won’t ever win this game.

You will shed tears over this game; sniffling ugly snot tears bringing up blood on your cheek, hot to the touch.

But this game, it will make you laugh, too; out loud, even, and at an inappropriate time, perhaps over dinner in a crowded restaurant at the moment when everyone else falls silent, only cutlery scraping.

This game, it will make you lose your mind, will turn you raving; lunar tide pulling melancholic sense the shore across, impulsive sanguine bubbling up: boisterousness taking over.

This game will open without your permission and likely without your knowledge.

In this game, you may only ever move forward.

Once you make a move you can never go back.

You will mess up this game many times. You will tear a hole in the knee of your favorite pants playing this game. You will soil your undies. You will brandish scars like battle flags. You will cut your hair and let grow it back again. Your body will lose its shape, and you will find it again, but only for a short time: it will fall back out. Your skin will sag, wrinkly and soft, and your senses will weaken. You will forget the moves you made one thousand turns ago. Your pawns will be taken hostage, and you will forsake them. You will lose pieces you can’t replace. You will waste turns trying to throw this game. You will toss your original strategy out the window and watch it get run over by a careless delivery truck driver, your best intentions wound tight around the axel, sinewy and stretched beyond capacity.

But you won’t trade this game for anything. Not even a chance to start over.

xoxo

M.L. H’art

Shell, broke.

Hanging heavy in the room, you want to pluck it from the air, a tangible note weighted in the palm of your hand – the heft of tradition sitting solid in the curves of your head, life, fate and marriage lines, creases reaching out past mercury, sun, saturn and jupiter, stretching decades beyond your own understanding, pitting a deep-seeded sense of safety low down in the hollow of your stomach reminding you, yes, love, you and me, we’re all in this together; suffering is all relative to our own experience, it be in me the way we share breakfast, eggs of the same fowl prepared a little different, preferences considered by the cook before that shell be broke open on a hot skillet not washed between meals on the short order line at Route 99 on Sunday morning’s after church. Empathy is easier than you think because the extent of that way I feel is just the same as you. You is me is we is us – the fiction of life caught up in song, the refrain a catchy bit skipping, a record scratched because it was loved so very much, a rooted scar ripped in a perfect line across your favorite song and though you try your best to remember the words you realize in that instant, it’s just gone.

Valdy and Suzie and Shari and Dakota Dave singing songs for Haunted Hearts on cold winter nights when we – you and me and the neighbours from down the street – unbundle indoors on eves best left to courageous winds of change whipping at eighty kilometers an hour down streets older than you and me combined; that moment of pitch perfect harmony drawing experience nearer with the twang of a guitar string, slightly out of tune but nonetheless singing truth of a time we may not have experience of but know in our hearts it’s true if only because Grandpa or Grammie said it to be true.

xoxo,

M.L. H’art

Brush out the Knots

There are days when I miss you most. Friends sharing fleeting thoughts, the moment we thought we could take the scenic route to Alaska, you and me in that old rust bucket Topaz eating gas station jerky and drinking day flat Dr. Pepper warmed by stalled summer air.

You and me and the infinite open highway, longing for hot days on rooftops reached only by ladders and lost frisbees, your died dark hair spitting sweat on a Tuesday when you told me you loved me and broke the old motel door down just to prove it, frame cracked and fallen the same night you ponytailed my hair as I lost dinner over a bottle of Jack; you tucked me into bed, my tears wetting up scratchy sheets and said: dear, take care, dear; I’ll wake you in the morning to brush out the knots.

And when I cried the second time ’cause my daddy forgot my birthday the seventh time in my life you laughed, wrinkle-smiles pulling cat-eyes closed, and pawed my back, protective mitt soft-palm open, and  said to me: we all born of the same white bread girl, it all circles back to the middle some time.

We reminisce, we do: that bless and curse of growing up poor in a ‘hood known for its breaks and enters, its eleven-twelve-thirteens smoking and swearing and drinking and dealing and getting expelled in grade seven. The unnecessary and the unwanted: a band of black sheep with the shiniest coats and darkest records holed up in the halfway house down the street from where I grew up, down the street from where you went to school, around the corner from your first kiss, around the corner from my first liquor ticket.

We walk and walk, we do – we did, we used to. Late nights in small towns with nothing better to do than blame our upbringing or our young parents or too little time or littler money or less interest.

‘Cause there’s always Fish over the Moon selling booze to underagers or Trooper on stage at The Electric Cowboy or an old flick at the cheap seats where the staff don’t mind when you smuggle in your flask.

Truth is, it was all just exposure to the elements. Learning how to make (Kraft) dinner and mix (Kool Aid) juice and listen when spoke to and nod when known better and being better for it, really.

We never did make it to Alaska, you and me. But Lord knows we turned out all right, we did.

xoxo

M.L. H’art