The Ring

My days, are worded.

Like an antique, heavy, brazen, ring, studded with plump, colorful, disharmonized gems.
At the end of it all, four words ring as I play my singing bowl.

What can I do?

The world, home, mother, faith, poverty, injustice, illness, humanity, betrayal, aging, living, guilt, pleasure, deception, protection, apathy…

If I think that I am more, would I?
If I think that it’s not real, would it?
I no longer seek an answer.

I pretend that it’s never happened and ask for more passivity over the counter.

Friend, chicken soup, rain, steeped tea, whiskey, birthday present, husky puppy, broad shoulders, immigration, imagination, yoga, sex, resume, adulthood, divorce, hotel, smile, hookah, love, umbrella, qualification, drugs, poetry, emerald, money, mother, home, injustice, guilt, home…  home…

home…

If I say it’s not, would it be, not?
If I say I don’t, would you?

Hands, shaking, heart, pounding, and you know I’m ok.
Head, light, eyes, black, out, fluttering, open, we’re all ok.

Priorities, selfishness, helplessness, happiness, oblivion, irresponsibility…you had me day dreaming about new horizons…how dare you? Prejudice, death, self-righteousness, burden, care, love, rain, saved, sacrifice, knees, tired, lonely, betrayal, mother, home… mother… round and around and around I arrive to where I started,
absent myself.

If I retrace my steps, would I run into myself?

Phone rings…

Don’t worry she says…she worries about me.
I’m not worried, I say! I worry about her.
We worry that we make each other worried and that worries us.

I look through a list of names; can I seek comfort in anybody’s embrace? I need an escape.

Today, my word was ‘need’.

For less than a second, the need escapes me. The need to help, to fix, to have, to be, to know, to need.

I am nothing, if not a path. 

In the mirror, where the shadow falls upon my bare body,
is where I let the magic and the real, have a dog fight.

You had me believing that I am still me, without the need to be the me, that has been betting the wrong side.

You had me put all that I could own up to, on a magic realism that is engraved, with a grim truth;
that at the end of the day, where ‘what can I do’ has no answer, the reality wins; and I flush the magic down the toilet with the rest of the words I have no need for…

I couldn’t have been more wrong…the word for tomorrow, is home; and for the day after that, and the day after…

The reality loses and I cut the fences around the ring and let the magic be the word my home needs to have.