It gets dark and it gets tough.
I see my self in the mirror,
There are no more songs to sing along to.
There is a bed,
There is my life,
Difficult to stomach,
The only chance I've got.

“Head, Heart” by Lydia Davis

Heart weeps.
Head tries to help heart.
Head tells heart how it is, again:
You will lose the ones you love. They will all go. But even the earth will go, someday.
Heart feels better, then.
But the words of head do not remain long in the ears of heart.
Heart is so new to this.
I want them back, says heart.
Head is all heart has.
Help, head. Help heart.

Saying Goodbye. Saying Hello.

It's an odd feeling, leaving the old behind. Indescribable, yet at times so tangible. Descriptions perched on the tip of my tongue, like a skilled but nervous diver on the edge of the high board, squinting at the ant-like people below. Waiting, just waiting. I want to tell you what it feels like and then in a moment it's gone. Jumped off the board or climbed down the ladder. Either way. Please understand... this is not a bad thing. The complete opposite. I want more. More of being on the edge. More of seeing how close I can get before I realize the outcome of the high diver. Which end was chosen? I smile either way. If I can explain it, I open. If I can't, I open. Either way I win. The word open has taken on a new meaning. A physical feeling inside my chest. The fourth chakra. A game I play with my self. Can I feel the energy eminating from behind the thick milky colured sternum? If I can't, I simply open. It's another win win situation.

This new found awareness is causing crows feet form around my eyes in the best way possible. Muscles in my face, around my mouth, in my lips, my cheeks, small delicate fibers I had forgotten about are getting a work out of their very own. Words that sat idle in my mind are being used with gusto. Glorious being a favorite of late. I can't help it I want to say to everyone I see. I can't help it. I finally feel like I understand why life is beautiful. And that realization, that real realization of the realist sort is so very evident on my face and I love every minute of it.

In Michael Robins’s class minus one
by Bob Hicok

At the desk where the boy sat, he sees the Chicago River.
It raises its hand.
It asks if metaphor should burn.
He says fire is the basis for all forms of the mouth.
He asks, why did you fill the boy with your going?
I didn't know a boy had been added to me, the river says.
Would you have given him back if you knew?
I think so, the river says, I have so many boys in me,
I'm worn out stroking eyes looking up at the day.
Have you written a poem for us? he asks the river,
and the river reads its poem,
and the other students tell the river
it sounds like a poem the boy would have written,
that they smell the boy's cigarettes
in the poem, they feel his teeth
biting the page.
And the river asks, did this boy dream of horses?
because I suddenly dream of horses, I suddenly dream.
They're in a circle and the river says, I've never understood
round things, why would leaving come back
to itself?
And a girl makes a kiss with her mouth and leans it
against the river, and the kiss flows away
but the river wants it back, the river makes sounds
to go after the kiss.
And they all make sounds for the river to carry to the boy.
And the river promises to never surrender the boy's shape
to the ocean.

Perspective.

Failing and Flying
by Jack Gilbert

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It's the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.

Taking back the body.

It was all adding up to this moment. The final test of acceptance. The bed was soft. My thighs and stomach were softer. I ran my hands over them, feeling every bump, every mole, every inch of smooth, silky, alabaster skin. I let my hands slid down my legs. Massaging the raised, inflamed continents of my body. My natural tattoos. Further down, strong, thick ankles. A quiet thank you slipped from my lips. Then louder. Honest, genuine love flowed from inside. I thanked every part of my body I had ever spoken down to. Legs, ankles, feet, toes. They had and will continue to carry me all over the world. They propelled me on a rusty, blue, bike. A bike that carried both my mother and father at different times in their lives. My father, in a suit on his way home from the train. My mother, with a baby on the back and another child peddling behind her as they rode around the lake. I thanked my stomach for allowing me to digest the most divine, luscious, food. My head, with its ears, eyes, mouth and nose. Gateways to so many glorious pieces of life. Thank you. Thank you. You are wonderful, marvelous, majestic. You are the best you that ever existed.
Later explaining it to my love I said with a new found confidence, if my body was a friend she would hate me. She would sit in her darkened room and cry. She would look in the mirror and she would hate what she saw. Why would I speak to a friend like that, I asked. Why would I speak to my body like that? If my body could have it would have deserted me years ago. I made a promise then, to thank it every single day.

Wood & Water, part 1

That summer I saw 3 cicadas. The first with my love on a walk. He pointed it out, crushed on concrete by a dumpster near our house. The other two I held in my hands. I enclosed each of them in triangles made from natures debris. Wood, a feather, objects found on the ground beneath our feet. One flew away leaving an empty shape. I wondered what it was that gave her enough strength to fly away from her new linear home. She had been still in my palm, surely on her last legs. The third was dead, but intact, not crushed like the first. It remained where I lay it, on the grass for another to find.
Before that summer I had never seen a cicada, though they filled the sticky Mississauga nights of my childhood with a constant buzzing. The sound wasn't important to a girl with roller skates strapped to her feet and tangles in her long, auburn, hair. Construction, I thought. Chainsaws in the distance. Or crickets. But I knew I was wrong. Later when I was a lonely teen in the throws of puberty I saw a nature special on TV. University students were studying these strange creatures. Seventeen years of their life spent underground only to emerge with enough time to mate before their life cycle reached its final stage. Loud enough to cause permanent hearing loss in humans if held just outside the ear. How did this two inch, obstreperous insect, the only constant sound of my summers, remain unseen for 27 years of my life? I felt later, that finding 3 in one summer must have meant something. What did this natural dweller of the dark soil have to teach me?

Humber River, July 8

me·tem·psy·cho·sis

 /məˌtɛmsəˈkoʊsɪs, -ˌtɛmp-, ˌmɛtəmsaɪ-/ Show Spellmuh-tem-suh-koh-sis

The transmigration of the soul, esp. the passage of the soul after death from a human or animal to some other human or animal body.

To pass from one body into another