Ed Said.

Ed said: the note of G, the color red, one earth day – twenty three hours and fifty seven minutes – are all born of the same harmony. C sharp and blue-green, one earth year – the same.

The harmony of sound and light and time and being all wavering at equal frequency.

The chakra a grounding force of connection and earth energy; the slowest vibration an earth toned root; the fastest, a tidal pull in and out.  

Ed said: the alpha wave, the awareness of you and me and the world around us – exists as an energy field.

So, let’s get lost, let’s fall off the hook, let’s touch the vibration, let’s get held in the sound: sound, which came before music, before language.

The simplicity of the echo of time: the mallet to gong a tangible vibration telling stories of settlement and struggle and triumph and change.

Deliberate and slow, Ed said: do you hear it, the hook of tempo? Can you feel it, the vibration of experience? Can you see it, the reverberation lapping like waves?

It’s the sound of healing.

xoxo,
M.L. H’art

Broken Butterfly Wings.

Lying in dream, hospital bed covered by a shed of broken butterfly wings, the doctor says: you’re pregnant.

Real life me, she knows nothing of swollen belly or hard contractions or broken water.

Push, the doctor orders, pressing cold cloth to my now beaded brow.

The pain, its real life hurt and dream me lets out yelps of an unforgiving uterus.

It’s a push and a push and a push and it’s over. I stand, gown clad and confused, at the end of a long corridor, hospital fluorescents flickering dream confusion.

Deflated belly, the pang of empty stomach, I ask for the baby.

Baby? the doctor asks. Why, there’s no baby.  

Hands on soft flesh, I feel tight skin that’s never stretched.

But the pain? I ask.

You’ve been eating broken butterfly wings again, the doctor says. Stern brow, steel rimmed glasses, pocked nose, pinched mouth.

We’ve told you, they aren’t good for you.

I nod, I know.

They’ll be gone soon enough, glint of knife a broken sparkle of light.

xoxo,

M.L. H’art

Playin’ Odds.

He doesn’t tell me I have cancer.

Instead, he says: adenomatous polyposis. He says: genetic abnormality. He says: follicular thyroid carcinoma.

I say: I’m fucking tired of the Latin, doc.

He says: it’s nothing. A small incision and we’re through here.

The date wrote down in my schedule and his, a handshake out the door and he doesn’t know I spend the night googling big words.

The Mayo Clinic, it says abnormal cells grow rapidly, lose the ability to die. Apocalyptic influx of undead cells – night of the living cancer.

The Thyroid Foundation of Canada says this type, it’s not very common. Only 15,000 people annually in North America. North America, the land of opportunity and 516,766,000 people. A 2.9% chance of diagnosis.

The Medical Association says it’s a consequence of allelotyping of follicular thyroid carcinoma: frequent allelic losses in chromosome arms. My arms and no cross to bear.

The thyroidectomy, it starts with a drug: an anesthetic huff or injection. Monitors for heart rate, for blood pressure, for blood oxygen, for blip-bloop back up to the doctor’s slice chorus.

A day’s stay in the hospital for good measure and I’m home with neck pain, hoarse voice, thyroid hormone therapy. Didn’t really need that part of the endocrine system anyway.

The success rate in excess of 95%. A lil’ better odds round the table than the first hand.

But no one tells me I have cancer.

xoxo,
M.L. H’art

Old Blood.

“You from the Cayman Islands?” words muffled through paper.

Catching armpits on crutches, patient chart pinched between central incisors, his foot is broken.

“No, I’m not.”

“You should be. Your last name – it’s the same last name of the foam cup king. You know the one – the baron who invented Styrofoam coffee cups. He owns half the Cayman Islands! Yeah, I bet you’re related. Look at you.”

One stiff leg jutting out in front of him, he teeters, totters, tick-tocks, flops onto the black physician chair, a resident student hand flying out to stop ancient bones from tipping over.

“You ever been exposed to radiation?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Yeah, you know. Chernobyl. Radiation. Know how they discovered Chernobyl?” he turns to the second student standing shy in the corner, How to Memorize Quickly and Efficiently: A Guide’s nose poking out of her white coat pocket. Wide-eyed owl eyes dart around the room – she’s not sure how to answer this particular question.

“No, sir. I don’t.”

“Turns out – “ the back of his hand taps my shoulder.

We should be sitting in a bar over beers.

“ – turns out, the cloud, it went east and west. The first traces of radiation were actually found in Sweden, probably even over in England.”

The students, all three, nod, smile, nod. One reaches for a pen as though to write it down: east and west, check.

“If you’re not from the Cayman Islands, where’s your family from?”

“Uh, England, mostly.”

Bearing weight on just one leg, he stands, tugging on my shirt collar.

“Come on, get up.”

Soft and pale, cold fingers reaching around my neck.

To his students: “Did you feel this? What a great day for you to be here, huh? Look at the size of this!”

I am a showcase medical mystery, prime time television programming complete with montage back-story.

Sipping cup after cup of Dixie’s water, all three medical students take turns touching me.

I am the miniature pony at the petting zoo, matted mane and dirt-caked hooves.

With his back to me, he talks: a language I don’t understand. The students, they nod and write important Latin words in tiny notebooks they’ll pour over later in preparation for the big exam.

Turning back my way, he has a needle in one hand and an alcohol soaked cloth in the other.

I am the proven thesis of an experiment gone wrong.

“Lay down. Good. Now, you’re going to feel a little pressure here.”

Needle digging cold metal, a pin prick pushing suprasternal notches, pushing sternomastoid, pushing cricoid cartilage. Heaviness begging fluid, begging old blood, brown blood, begging cells, ruined cells.

“There we have it.” Vial glinting fluorescent light, dark and full.

“The tumor, it’s hemorrhaging.”

xoxo,
M.L. H’art

Wahton.

Waiting.

in line, too long, impatiently.

Wait for.

your turn, the weekend, it.

Wait until.

The Call.

Hello, she says, hello how are you feeling? Have you been well? Sorry for the wait.

The wait: stationary readiness and the hold of expectation; a pause – please catch up! Be available, attentive and attending – be ready to realize the unrealized.

The result?

Inconclusive, she says. The results, she says, well, they aren’t enough.

You see, the cells, the ones scraped out of you, are diluted. All wet with fluid and inconclusive. It’s likely, she says, it’s nothing. No need to worry, really. But it’s always best. Best to get a second opinion.

Second opinion, differing point of view – an alternative solution.

Surgery, she says. It’s a possible solution.

Steady handwork, manual extraction, the deep sleep before the slice.

The excision, she says. It will be an excision.

Excision. Resection. Exorcism. Exorcismus.

Out, out foul spirit.

Swapping letters, Catholic school girl habits reaching for the rosary. Please god…

So, she says, we’ll see you again in just a few weeks time. Till then, just relax and…

…wait.

xoxo

M.L. H’art

Graves.

I slept with the butterfly, allowed it to flap up inside, flutter by hymen, forewing flickering cervix up to vulva; pushing proboscis past anatomical barriers, this butterfly trembled through cardia and corpus, tickled curvature, great and less. Thorax and tarsi prickling pharynx and larynx, a long climb up the vertebral, it dug its palps right into my throat, stole my words.

Laying out the long length of the line of neck for the doctor to take a look, the curve of shoulder to clavicle exposing stretched skin between sternum and scapula, the jugular-pulse an internal lug of blue blood, I am naked.

Baring my shield, an oblong door to the heart of the throat made of steel valour, which – if I had the parts – would bare the peculiar angle of forbidden fruit consumed, I am under the watch of Drs. Galen and Wharton, standing shoulder-close, notebooks in hand.

A pin-prick dig around inside and I am under the microscope – a look-see hide and seek game of who knows what’s next, optically scoping dark corners of neck inferior to expose a constellation of consequential symptoms caused by iodine and tyrosine and thyroxine racing metabolism around and around the trachea rings, so early in the morning.

The butterfly regresses: from flutter to reverse metamorphosis to chrysalis – hard pupa shell tucked tight. Too delicate to touch, the disc of forming butterfly wings running the same length of the tracheae, a yellow-green-red patterned witch who, if let loose, would thief milk late at night.

But this butterfly-lover of mine refuses to let go.

xoxo,

M.L. H’art

Blue.

Stall 54, a slight space with grey walls and a heavy door.

“Take off everything but your underpanties,” her voice thick with accent.

I let the word “underpanties” bounce around my brain as the big door falls closed.

In the too small cattle stall, I change out of street clothes and fumble a heavy blue gown over goosebumped skin. The lady, she yells: “stay there till I come get you, k?”

“Okay,” I whisper.

I can hear the shuffling of other women, pent up, pawing the ground.

52 recites a hymn, half word, half hum as she rips the gown Velcro apart over and over again, the crick of hooks and loops keeping beat to the performance staged by 47 and her small son as they sing Old MacDonald’s Farm, the child’s voice an e-i-e-i-o echo of farm animals speaking Portuguese. 55 mumbles to herself, drops her purse, classic girl spill, tampons and lipstick and pens with chewed lids scattering the floor: “motherfuckinshit,” she huffs.

The personality of these numbers a show of feet on display in the one foot window between the door and the floor; I stare at poignant pumps and fraying flip flops and smart sneakers; I paint pictures of these women in my mind: coiffed backcombed ‘do, peasant skirt, pleated pantsuit, desperate ladder climbing, school-test-frenzy, long road retirement.

“54? 54!” her gravelled voice worn with use, camouflaging a slight lisp: “follow me, please.”

Downtrodden patients awkwardly fidgeting matching blue gowns, embarrassed by the bare ass underneath, line the walls. No one makes eye contact.

In the room, I’m told to lay down, lay still, don’t breath, look left, now right.

On the screen, my insides in auric light: dancing violet, indigo, blue and green, a sway of yellow, orange, red; a rainbow reveal of creativity, awareness, intuition, health, love, wisdom, happiness, courage; my being in parts: the brain, the brow, the throat, the heart, the stomach, the ovaries, the adrenal glands.

Blue, so much blue.

“Stay here,” the door a whoosh-shick behind her.

Under low lights, I stare at the tiled roof wondering how the sallow stain managed its way, way up there, when the doctor walks in.

He pauses thoughtfully before the imaging screen and nods his head, pulls a clenched fist up under his chin, removes his glasses and slides his open-pore-pocked nose closer and closer until he says: “Hm, why yes. Right, I see.”

He walks back out. Whoosh-shick.

She looks at me and grins: “let’s do it again!” repeating the board game dice roll that didn’t get her to the desired square offering the jackpot win.

This time, black and white, a scroll of larynx and lymphnodes and esophagus. On the screen: white, white, grey, white and then black, black, black – a big black void. A hole.

“Aha.”

A blip-bloop press of sonar machine buttons.

“K, you go now. You’ll know results in five to seven business days,” she says ushering me back out into the herd.

xoxo

M. L. H’art

Conversations with Dad (Canto II)

Choking its neck, his plump red-raw fingers – small flaps of torn skin pulled loose around the cuticles – curl tighter and tighter. He tilts the bottle to his lips, a light amber trickle dampening his beard. Swallowing loudly, a gush of afternoon-warm beer swills in his gullet; taking pause to catch his breath, he pushes wheezing stale air through the last of his teeth – only three calcium soldiers stand stained, nicotine and alcohol pocking their once strong enamel armour.

Wiping a paw across a wrinkled brow, his white widow-peaked hair revealing dark weather-leathered scalp, he averts eye contact. Lecturing the carpet as he speaks, his words fall into the snags of the flat orange-yellow flowers.

“I won’t be running for office any time soon,” his laughter deteriorating into a fit of phlegm-heavy coughs. “Do what you will,” a hand covering his mouth as he struggles to catch his breath, three sharp sucks of air kicking at his chest bone.

“I get to see what you’re going to do with this before you show anyone, right?” his hand waving away invisible flies when he says the word “this.”

“Like, editor’s rights before publishing? I should have some creative control over the way you paint my life. Then again, you don’t know the half of it. Not like you’ll share the worst of my story,” a wobbly chuckle, the sound of gravel squished under a worn-soft running shoe.

“Don’t matter much to me. I’ve done the worst I can with this life,” absently tapping a heavy gold ring against the lip of the table, his feet shuffle under the table as he readjusts his weight to fit a chair too small for his decades-widened girth. A hand patting his rotund tummy, he struggles as his lifts his weight. He adjusts the collar of his plaid driving jacket once steady on his feet.

“Nope, don’t matter much to me. Let’s go have a smoke.”

Outside, talking with a smoke in his hand, he is animated. He tells stories of a friend named Weasel who got them kicked out of the strip joint in Winnipeg the time Weasel tried to fall asleep in the girls’ pile of blankets set to the side of the stage. Or the time Weasel shoved a half empty beer bottle into the open fly of his pants and asked all them girls to take a taste. The stuff of urban legend.

Gasping the life out of the last flakes of nicotine caught between his finger and the filter, he tosses the butt to the ground, grinding it cold with the heel of his steel-toeds. Coughing again, the shudder shaking giant shoulders, his broad height becomes round and soft, old and worn. He throws open the door and yells on his way back to his seat: “Sweetheart, bring another round of beers, will ya?”

xoxo

M.L. H’art

Instant. Gratification.

Our culture of instant gratification…

 

“…offers something strangely compelling about the long tease.”

 

“…[is] killing a couple’s capacity to stay together for the long haul.”

 

“…take[s] away from the art form of a music album.”

 

“…gives a whole new meaning to the expression collective memory.”

 

“…focuses the effects of the sexual pleasure drive on a person’s emerging personality.”

 

“…questions legitimacy.”

 

“…is very important.”

 

 

« …questions the point of planning, anticipating, and developing long-term goals.”

 

“…leads us to overindulge in activities with immediate rewards and delayed costs.”

The art of Quitting.

I’ve been smoking too much. My chest hurts when I breath. A sharp pain splitting the length of my chest bone each time I inhale.

I know I should quit – I give myself the same pep talk each night before bed: Respect your body as it gives you every new day! Eat well! Drink less! Quit smoking! Cut back! Sleep more!

But every night ends with me sucking back one more vice, an effort to quiet the nonsense rattling around my brain, I guess.

Sure I’ve tried to quit; cleaned out my house, changed my habits, made new friends. But there’s comfort in the routine of addictions. You always know what comes next. Drink, smoke. Dinner, smoke. Drink, joint, smoke. In the morning its the same, the only difference is you replace “drink” with “coffee.”

Tomorrow will be different, I always tell myself, but I’m reminded of some bullshit philosophy paper I once read arguing that tomorrow doesn’t actually ever exist as we are perpetually in the present. Tomorrow is a figment of routine – another one of those comforts.

In remembering that article I’m able to justify another day of self inflicted abuse.

Hoorah.

I think I’ll have to see a doctor about the pain – it’s not natural, the pain, so I should do something before I become the next heavily government funded anti-fun poster child rallying against smoking and alcoholism and drug abuse because the elusive “they” agreed to pay the heart transplant hospital fees.

I hope it doesn’t involve surgery. I only had surgery once when I was five and in first grade. I had my tonsils out. It was fun, despite the pain of having a necessary part of your sinus network ripped out, because I did nothing but watch Wizard of Oz and eat orange popsicles while I healed. But every last fucking kid in my class sent a hand made construction paper and glue “Get Well” mess to me. My teacher delivered them all in a big brown paper envelope with my name printed neatly in equidistant first grade teacher’s perfect block lettering. While the gesture seems kind, the weight of these cards meant I might not make it. Get well is a euphemism for “thanks for not dying.”

So surgery is definitely out of the question.

Perhaps, instead of surgery or a visit to the doctor, I’ll just go to bed. I can think about this again tomorrow.

xoxo

M.L. H’art