I Breathe...

I woke with a head aching from the dreams I attempted to slow and replay in an utterly damning slideshow— my mind is more of a flip book in forward and reverse, and I grasp for near memories that slip past, but I only seem to ever pluck snippets of lips in voiceless cadence and eyes in blink— the laugh lines…the hands of a golden sun age— waves crashing at my shins, pulling sand from beneath my feet, leaving my toes afloat on sea breezes and my equilibrium tested on shell backs and lightning glass...

There’s a wind I can see in colors of evening’s frayed, and it carries with it muffled thoughts that hum like dunes and so I turn towards it— but still you aren’t there…you haven’t been there…but in some strange twist of life you steal in unseen on the tide…the sea foam that effervesces at my heels— I feel you and laugh to the rhythm of sandpiper’s stepping...

I can’t keep a handle on the pain that sickens my gut like a phantom organ giving me hell for the excising of it from my core.  I curl up in the restless haze and the torture the pain infects, contorting my body in angles I recall from surrealist hands, and just to take my mind off the ache I laugh my way through mathematical equations constellated in my pupils— the pain that knocks me about like a vessel in a tempest— I’m a shipwreck...

...and the hands of the ticking clock wait open to receive all of me...taking everything...making everything a thing of the past...

I think of children and how they run with their arms outstretched, certain they are nothing less than an airplane in flight as their little feet carry them miles from earth— I remember miles in flight— I carry exhaustion in my lungs—I let it go...and so I just breathe…I breathe...

E.A. O'Connell