Quadrennial Muse

 

This is how February ends. Nature's softest blossoms and a long stretch of thin sighs sticking onto the last splinters of a hope that used to be. A death and another. Staring into empty hands. A hospital bed. A woman in labour for a child whose casket and clothes await. February is for swift hands that brush off hasty tears.  I linger on the cusps of cyclopian dreams and sink my head beneath double sided mirrors and when I gasp, I do not know whose name my tong'ue speaks.

This is how February ends. In Rhetorics.

What would you have done in the face of the flames? Would you cradle the warmth in the undertones of your self destructive thoughts? Would you give it room for certainty, say, there is a ghost town of radicals and the best of them are scholars? Say, they make their homes under the ashes of Alexandria and they read the books that were grabbed by flames before arms could reach them? The best of them lawyers. They think Atlantis was better off uninhibited. They speak of a subconscious stream that the living are afraid to cross. There, the moon doesn’t know the story of skies chasing other skies. There, the moon has half stories of the water gods.

What would your apology do to a man who sits daily in his decay of humanness? How much more kindness does the world need to be fully okay? We die because we have to and we suffer for the same reason.  Oh, to  whom does time return with the trail of it's half-lived stories?

February, and I love disconnect, when I do not know why I am and who I will be. To guffaw. To wring out a cry from the sub domains of a second- hand heart. To laugh in the face of spite. I like the thought that death could be taking its toll while I drink cold strawberry milk. I like the thought that I am not God’s favorite. I am the excess that hangs on from the curve of his outward hand and he drags me along and once in a while I fall sick from the dust and my millennial bones have forged a freedom song for the dreams beneath skin, beyond the search of wanton eyes. He won’t let me go. Until when He will. 

Goodwill, come to tea and let us comfort you. Once, blood made pristine a tarnished white. Is white the colour of despair? Do angels forget their song sometimes? Are they allowed a day of rest  for themselves? Do they hang out in dominions telling human stories and envying the weight of the human heart?  Say we’re dust and names that the waves will cover in crashing white wetness? 

February is for the heart's hypnotic memory. So you are that which I will spend my life trying to forget? We are not familiar. But what if we were? Had been? Do you ever return to the teenage expanse where haze was the beauty of toil? Do you sit on your bed and ask..who is he?

Might you have another heart perhaps? Your daughter could rest on one and I on another.  I grieve with an open palm. I am the one holding out my hand. Send me a song when you empty your ash tray of its cigar butts. Again. When you remember your maman.  Write a story about me when you can. Say I am perpetual in my hunger. 

This is how February ends. Three sweets from Sophia. She says they will help with the cough that wants to peel my lungs off my chest. 

When sweet have no sugar. Have they lost their essence?