Happy Dirty Midnight Martinis

I'm always sorry when I bleed into the fabric as though I never heard it come rushing through the weave of winter.  As though I thought it might freeze before spreading through the hoar frost into your morning where it soaks into white, stark, stiff, and frightening.  I'm always sorry when I am enveloped between the soft down of gentle people and my threads come loose into happy dirty midnight martinis and I can't catch all the down drifting into our hair, our glasses, and sodden, sink like the stripped bird they kept warm once in a bed of straw where winter is no stranger.

I'm always sorry when I spill into your quiet like a the drip of a broken faucet that reaches past your peace and breaks every dream; down into parts unknown for the dark, though I am a regular  here, and I can never shake your fear for you nor medic your bruises.  I know it wasn't my hand delivering the punishing reminder of your fragile youth but it was me standing there with tears in my eyes and a knot for a heart.  Your quiet is your safety and I break in and break in but I never break through.

I'm sorry for the textures I've missed along the road full of the wild flowers I used to count and catalog in my mind.  The sage burning dry on the air in summer; filling hungry lungs, suspended in tissue like radio memory.  The chicory as blue and tough as depression food, I think of roasted roots offering some salve for war, some balm for poverty, some taste of plenty fleeting and frolicking in thin worn cotton frocks in the dust whorls of our bare life.  The wild rose as rich and random as the best tangle of thorns, reaching past our expectation and grabbing at the center of everything I am; apple to the nose but velvet to reverent fingers, and come the frigid erasure of heat the scarlet hips scream for us to stop and bear witness to everything unfolding silently between the thorns.

It was a comfort to be nothing more than the seed of a dandelion floating past life to seek my own millimeter of soil.  It was a comfort to be nothing much to anyone because I would rather that everyone be just a little more so I could tell the wind of all your worth like diamonds that I touch every day.  It was sudden, the way it cramped me up into a paper ball of trash; swift and sharp like an axe finding dry wood on the block, I fell easily and I burned quickly.

Being nothing is worse than being something degraded.  Being nothing cancels every breath.  It marginalizes every wish, every thought, every step that meets only air, because if you are nothing there is no touch, no memory, no taste, and you fade from everyone else's sight as though you are an invisible thread holding so many fragrant dreams together against the shoals.  A ghost signaling desperate ships ashore to find the bottom of the sea  to keep it company in the deep.

Even tonight I want everyone to be more than I am.  I want to deny it because I understand how I am supposed to be filled with this desire to conquer, to be recognized, to be something.  I wonder, as much as I love every breath of life, love waking up under warm down and watching my breath billow like dreams on the cold morning air, there's still a part of me that is at peace with dying, not being, being marginal, being invisible, being not here.

Life at any price is not my religion.

I am sorry when I bleed into other people's lives like cotton gauze soaking it up and webbing it outwards into discomfort.  It means I am more than nothing and something uncomfortable. 

I would give my place for you.  Whoever you are.

It's that fragile.  My own claim on this place I'm standing.

Like ice lace spreading across bridges in fragile patterns.

If your spirit asks me to I will trade your place in the morgue.  I will gladly slip into the cold and let the world drift away and my corporeal place be marked in stone.

There is no reconciling this with the fighting spirit I have unearthed like the clay pots of the desert; dessicated with dry age.  If I must answer as myself I will administer pain when attacked and I will pull my own wheel kicks to catch evil.

But give me a hungry child's eyes....show me my own son's pain and I would trade my entire being to relieve it.

I would lay down and be nothing if it would help him.

Some mothers do.

It won't help him though.

Instead I navigate knowing that if I bleed into the cloth of imagined faith, he will feel it drain from his reservoir; the pool of strength from which he finds his courage.  The place he can always fall apart and be put back together.  He calls this place "mother" and I answer with all the fire in my bones and all the warmth of my blood.

And I'm sorry when I spill it.  Because it means there is less for him to grab onto towards adulthood.

Winter stretches its blue hand to us and I visit my son in the night, while he sleeps, and I touch his brow with all the love I carry, I let it go like fairy dust, and I release myself back into the wild when I watch his pale face breath like a cub in hibernation and I understand the cost of his life. 

The cost of his life, is mine.