I woke up today after another night of electric dreams, body and mind in this turmoil of unnatural feeling chaos. Six days post spinal surgery, the medications flushing through and out of my body in a whir of healing and adjustments so rich and thick that I find myself lost in it. Emotions come flooding in, memories of desire. Nerves released from the confines of the drugs that held them and the bones that crushed them now an electric storm that comes through my fingers and my tongue. The years of stillness that contain the storm. Rather than catch fire, I released the charge through this poem, and the ocean came to soothe my cuts, and the albatross hopped alongside me, squaking in the dawn.
Photo by Aly Nicklas. Memories of my neck v 1.0.
The Albatross' Drum
Darkness, dark dreams and chaos of the mind, a disease of restless trapped in space time
confused, twisted,
stuck.
Chaos of the mind
Rest time, the early rhythms of rest
Body taken, given to the still
the art splinters so old and fractured, the rhythms of the day so taken
by hurricane swell
to have forgotten
what it is to ebb and flow with the moon
Waters rough with sand biting fish swimming into each other hardheaded collision with soft flesh tearing and the mind consumed by that storm without
always on some horizon brewing and raining its broken branches
and torn leaves and twisted memories unformed.
And yet I know the feel of a moon-swept swell
I know the promise of a red sea at night.
My skin is still soft with dawn’s dew, the golden kiss, when the world walked with me in concordance, one-two, one-two.
What new day awaits me, when this hurricane has blown its bits and exhausted it’s confused winds?
When it’s ripped the shore to its content and the tattered leaves are left to heal,
The thread-bare palm trunks
The crushed-soft shell of crab ripped wrongly into air.
Laying in the new sun, yawning white sun, tentatively reaching over the horizon
stretching long shadows of small grains of sand
the albatross hops, pecks to see the slight bit of life left from the last breath of salt-sea exhaled
the final twitch of remembered lightness in the salt-sea
the sand-sea,
now a claw finds only air and its heaviness,
slow grasping for nothing as the sharp bill
thunk-tunk-tunk
the rhythms of its death
its body become the drum that calls the crossing
and in dawn light the white clear new day light
the albatross and the crab call in the change,
theirs is the song of death and the life it births,
theirs is the rhythm of displacement and pain,
eaten alive to our own music played with our killer,
our bodies the instruments of our own perfect death and birth in the perfect dawn,
everything that was upside down and home is another planet that will never be relived, home is a memory of rhythms, once soft and swishing with the moon, now the sharp pain of the coming night.
Have you walked the chaos of a storm-swept beach while the albatross calls in the dawn.
Have you smelled the seaweed on his rough orange claws
Remembered the quiet rattle of eternal plastic in his belly
Shuk-shuk
Seen the sharp white of his wings
Heard the glistening of his red-streaked beak
Thunk-thunk
His death drum draws in the new day
Thunk-thunk
Twisted fronds
A soft bed of seagrass
Twisted with red weeds and bubbly yellow tangles of a healthy sea
Salt-burned air
Small deaths upon the surface, today , tomorrow
The midnight eats the day when the storm screams,
Vomits it out to the ancient drumbeat of my beloved albatross
Set down from gleeful swooping windburn storm games
Holding our sickness in his dogged cycles
Kin in curiosity, my sweet friend, we chase the same glinting tangles of rainbow sickness with ancient memories of the times they nurtured, with our eternal optimism,
for the times when we beat the rhythm,
hurricane-carried truth,
of the times when we were the drum.
+ + + +
Thank you for being here with me. Sharing this space with you is a beautiful gift.
How do you find peace in long stretches of physcial stillness? I’d love to know.
Share this post