Prayer: Plume, Redux

I don't pray much, anymore, at least not intentionally. Only so many times I can listen to the phone ring before I hang up from waiting. I tend to pray by reflex, when I'm exhausted or overstressed.

Funny...I should be praying 24/7, these days.

Sometimes, in rare quiet moments, I'll find myself trying to pray but don't know what to say. Even rarer than that are those times when I find someone voicing the prayer just right and in a way I could not articulate. Like finding another diamond in the mud. Tonight was a diamond night:

Faults have weighed on my confidence

The years have stolen my innocence

It's hard to pay the price for this

Tonight could be the last to spend

Just see me through the night

Just see me through the fight

Somehow

Somehow, ooohhh

Now I'm, I'm looking for ways to hide

from the walls between every voice inside

I'm caught in something I can't describe

So I, I wait just for you tonight

Just see me through the night

Just see me through the fight

Somehow

Maybe hope will buy us another day

and time will fix what I can't erase

But it all feels millions of miles away

and I don't think I'll get there anyway

Can you change my thoughts around?

And I pray you'll stay for now

Can you save what's breaking down?

Just see me through the fight

Somehow

Somehow

Just see me through the night

Just see me through the fight

Somehow

Somehow

Lyrics above are by Mutemath, are unofficial and used without permission. But they sure are beautiful, aren't they?

Plume

On the horns, yeah? You know how that feels, I'm sure. A human condition, although the struggle to feel human can be long and difficult. This I know; hopefully, you do not. I generate intense heat and smoke in the effort, yet not enough light.

I am in combat with myself. A declaration of war wrought by the hole punched in my heart.

The struggle is to contain that which spews forth, this dark and viscous matter congealed inside the soft pressure vessel I call my soul. Icy tendrils of panic curl around an overheated brain as the implications rear their ugly heads. Thoughts and questions and doubts tainting the water.  Racing to cover it, contain it, before it spreads and befouls the beautiful and the innocent who should not suffer the consequences of my internal strife.

Writing from what I know...but what if all I know appears to be sadness and melancholy? Why would anyone want to be near this broken well? I lay on my couch this morning, staring at the ceiling and thinking "What would happen if I wrote that which was truly in my heart?" How much life would be choked out, how much sand on the rim of my ocean would be stained near to ruin? My heart, pouring out the liquid memory of flora and fauna crushed long ago and in a different time.

Useful, perhaps, if contained and directed with focused intelligence. Poisonous if left to its own devices, with no control over its flow and heading.

What can I make of this, my heart? A broken and bleeding vessel I occasionally show to the world and hope that it is received with respect, if not affection; hoping to be shown without being abused, at least. This time, it is different. This time, I am afraid of something I cannot articulate. I am afraid of what would happen if I were to let loose the things that reside in my heart, because there is no guarantee of reestablishing control. I'm not even sure why I am writing this at this moment, other than to state that I feel I must. The analogy of the relief well comes to mind, and I can only hope this reduces the pressure until I figure it out.

I closed my eyes this morning, laying on the couch. Behind the lids, in the dark, I could see the plume curling like a taloned fist. A color-enhanced photograph shot from space and used as a prop in a video warning of the damages caused by pollution...but in this case, the ocean is shaped like me.

In Search of Mangos

"Never get out of the boat." Absolutely goddamn right! Unless you were goin' all the way...

-Capt. Benjamin Willard (Martin Sheen) in 'Apocalypse Now'

Apocalypse Now is one of my three favorite movies of all time. Tonight, I watched it again on DVD, the original version, not the 'Redux'. I'll save 'Redux' for another time, when I have time. Seeing it tonight was...accidental.

I wasn't intending to watch it. I was intending to do something else entirely, which will have to wait until tomorrow. Eating dinner, I was mulling some things over, trying hard not to to think too much but all these jumbled thoughts and ruminations were seething in my head. Have you ever seen a fish pond or fish farm where the fish seem to know when they are about to be fed? An outstretched hand flings some bread or meal pellets over the water and the surface turns into this roiling mass of fish bodies, tumbling and jumping over one another in a frantic, greedy rush to get food. Picture that.

See? That's what it feels like to me sometimes when I think.

Sound. Color. A snippet of conversation overheard. Thoughts rise to the surface of my mind, mouths agape and grasping at the data. And I can rarely stop them. Something I saw or overheard while at dinner threw the feed into the pond. For whatever reason, I kept recalling movie quotes, mostly stuff from Pulp Fiction and the aforementioned Francis Coppola opus.  The DVD was home in a box, so I took it out to skim through it. I ended up watching the whole thing.

The prompt for that quote was inspired by Willard and a companion being attacked by a tiger, after having gotten off the boat, in search of mangos. I know that comedy wasn't the intent of the scene, but I couldn't stifle a laugh when I saw it. It bore too much resemblance to my life at the moment. All I wanted was some mangos, so I had to get out of the boat. That's when the tiger attacked me.

Captain Willard finishes by saying "Kurtz got off the boat. He split from the whole fuckin' program." This Year of My Unsettlement, the tiger chasing me, breathing down my neck...it makes me want to split from the program. So I keep running, looking, hoping...

Never get off the boat. Absolutely goddamn right. What happens now, having been pushed or thrown off the boat? I have nowhere else to go...

...unless it's going all the way.

An Alien Sky

It was a simple folding camp chair, the same camp chair in which I sat many summers, wearing my shirt of peachy-salmon cotton, in that time before the universe folded in upon itself.  The shorts, the grass-stained shoes which need replacing...we know each other well, but the sky above became a stranger's face I strained to recall having seen before.

The sun has set behind the trees far away across the field, bathing the sky in shades that match my shirt, fading into indigo and wine. 'This is perfect' I say to myself as we await the fireworks. Relaxation has slowly spread from the pit of my belly and into my legs and arms and mind. For the first time in months the feeling of being human has come back, and the effect is so soothing I lean my head back and slump down in the camp chair. Briefly, so slowly, my eyes close upon the gently brightening stars above. Listening to my daughter and the murmurs and chatter of the people around us, I drift into a reverie.

The stars above resolve themselves into familiar patterns at first. They start to snap into focus as I recall the nights spent outdoors with my G-maw, binoculars to the eyes and her outstretched hand pointing as she named the points of light and the constellations. Orion. Cygnus. Betelgeuse. Sirius. I remember them well. She turns to me and I see the smile on her face in the silvery half-light. My eyes are shut.

I blink, and spasm slightly, fingers gripping the armrests as I try and figure out where I am. Had I fallen asleep? If so, it was only for a very brief moment. I felt as if I had suddenly moved a great distance and at great speed. My eyes fluttered rapidly as I tried to shake off the disorientation. I was staring upwards, but at stars I could not name. Nothing was where I remembered it to be. It flashed before me that I was on another planet, one tremendously far from Earth, and the constellations I had known were nowhere to be found.

My daughter laughed again, chasing after a light stick flung over my shoulder and into the grass behind the chair. I gasped and squeezed my eyes shut and then opened them. The stars, they made sense again. I called over to her, feeling myself back on Earth or someplace like it.

I do not need to read science fiction to imagine having to navigate unfamiliar skies at night. I know, already. My life has tumbled violently in the past few years, flinging me far out of my familiar orbits and into space unknown. Standing in the soil of an alien planet, alone and panicked, Orion and Canis Major cannot find me no matter how expertly they hunt. Rather, I cannot find them. By the light of foreign suns, I'll have to forge a path anew, seeking home across any distance no matter how great. My sensors are up. They sort through the static and hiss, locking on to the only beacon by which I can navigate.

"Catch, daddy! 1, 2, 3...!"

She throws a glowing loop, and my hands rise reflexively to grasp it. We laugh together, and I set my course for home.