There is something deep inside me, I don’t know whoplaced it there. Perhaps it entered me the way the northwind enters a woman’s dress knocking loudly on herknees, making her head turn and her face flush beforefreezing the flesh of her thighs. Sometimes I think itsank into me when my birth water was washed away. Itdoesn’t matter how it arrived. It’s here and insists ongoing for long walks to take the night air.
Once and only once the days were little finger bells thatsounded so nicely. Then the dancing stopped, the bandshell collapsed, and now there is only the air playingsingle notes on a rasping lung. This does not matter toyou, BUT (finally that word appears like a mountaincutting off the view of the valley I loved to look at) thehour hand has hypnotized your days and meaninglessmotions fill your life. And this thing inside me wants towaken you. It is as if the forests were on fire and thesquirrels and earthworms adjourned their meetings andthe wild flowers with no next of kin perished. Nowpeople pretend that the pinks and the purples thatcoloured the hills never existed, maybe they sawsomething else. A white sheet at midnight can bemistaken for a ghost or so I have been told.
Pay attention to what I am about to say. What is deepinside me moves away from the darkness, the lily pads,the tiny fish and the coral reef where it breathes andbathes, multiplies and manipulates the light into redand yellow streamers. And just as it is blindfolded andthe final commands are given, it speaks because itcannot be silenced the way a volcano sitting still foryears suddenly shakes and pulls open its lower lipspilling knowledge over the world. (After this thereare always tears, destroyed thoughts, uninhabitableideologies and the smell of smoke reminds us thatTruth is forever burning.)
And what bubbles from within me fills broken boxcars,becomes fruit in a petrified forest or finds its way to adying river that lives on in the memory of spring, thesmell of muck and weeds that once filled its emptybelly.
