I kicked the jellybeans off of the NorthHampton Brewery Corp crate and you laughed. Their tupperware coffin rattled. Sweet tubs of a long road paved by their goodyland bullets. I sat with my left foot folded over cross legged and my right foot on the wood of the crate. My breathing reached my feet and the green toenails and I saw the red blood fed by my slow respirations and it felt unusual to have sensation there. After we finished watching LOST, we got up together and you put way the pizza we had made. I put too much sauce at first. I spread the dough and you cut the fresh pineapple and pepperoni. You agreed to green peppers. Our silent heads worked. I don't know what you were thinking as you prepared our meal. I think that is the crux.
I took my mug of cold cider over to the stove and put it down. I was going to heat it up and drink it. But instead I stood and felt the blood in my legs. There are days when I can feel my connection to the earth more. It is usually after I am altered somehow, and the two beers over at the Den, over at the poetry slam in Charles Village were definitely still in me.
I have a psychic twist here. I know that I have thought that I didn't have a connection as tight as it could be. Even when I was 13 and I would run to Howard hill and back, my breathing and my body were a meditation toward freeing myself from worries. And you saw me standing there; I thought of my father saying: "Go to hell!" I thought of how you two talked outside over Thanksgiving, and of how he came back in and put his hand on my arm. I thought of how he still didn't say sorry, or say anything that lets me know that he wants to know who I really am. I cried a moment realizing that I hadn't ever let him go. All this time. All this time and I can't convince him that energy is real and that there is a dance of loving words that he declines. Thanksgiving was a frantic feast. Men downstairs arguing over quince pie. William made almond crust and litigated for oven space against Joans' crust weighed down by blue marbles for the lemon meringue. Upstairs the women made the other pies and all was extremely pressured, like a huge thumb pushing our backs. There was laughter, but mostly there was a deep feeling that my father looked down on me. He didn't congratulate me on my new job as a massage therapy instructor. He categorized it all as aromatherapy and foolishness. What a cruel mind!
You put your arms around me and I began to speak about my legs and feeling rooted to the earth and maybe you said, "oh yeah?" or maybe you said. "great." or maybe you said something sweetened with the reaching out of your presence to mine. Either way, I meant it literally and meaningfully and it was taken so....lightly.
And you took my hand and sat me back down and I didn't drink more cider. I rubbed my feet. I tried to forget that I felt this way again. I remember saying to you in the very beginning, that the problem I have had in the past has to do with the fifth chakra, with communicating in my own voice and that I don't feel received. Maybe it is only a psychological dissonance. In fact, IT IS a psychological dissonance. But I attributed it then to having spent two years as a waitress. Now I feel that there is an essential modicum of attention possessed of real spirit that must exist to express truths. And I listen and I listen and I listen and I listen.Meaning exists on the backs of belief doesn't it? You must have heard me, must have understood though the senstion was that I don't matter, I am brushed aside for Lethal Weapon 3. It can't be. But I still carry that feeling, that someone in bar or bookstore or at school, will get the fullest attentions, fullest glances that I hold only for you. I glanced over and down into a pile of books and onto a couple that have been growning more magnetizing. I rested in the foreknowledge of a slight disappointment. I asked you if you knew the future and how you see it. "I see us together." you said. Inconsequentialy I glanced up to see the candle marked "faith". Next year perhaps I will spend the holiday mediatating on peace, with a warm dish of lavender in the basement on top of the furnace, the scents of my vocation coming up under the door, wafting past the organic trash, and across the stove, mingling with the coffee.
