I write tonight after two days of constant movement, when my body and mind have not had time to sit on the couch, rest in the dusky light of completed grocery lists. My mother used to call this "bone tired," when she would sit down after supper dishes were washed, lay her head back in her chair, close her eyes, and eat the stillness of her limbs like a black bear gulping ripe summer blueberries. Bone tired, as if skeletal calcium has been replaced by an arthritis of exhaustion. I could Rip Van Winkle here, in this kitchen chair. Fall asleep and bowl games of nine pin with strange little men for 70 years, until my leaky roof, brake problems, mental illness, addictions, mortgages and water bills, have disintegrated into cremains, returned to the earth to nourish or poison. If you see me napping in my chair, don't wake me. Throw a blanket over my shoulders. And don't set an alarm. Let me sleep long. Five hours. Five days. Five months. Five years. Five times fifty years. Let me sleep until Donald Trump is no longer in the Oval Office. Until climate change becomes extinct, and the world is green, clean again. Let me sleep until a broken heart can be mended by taking a fat, red pill at night with enough water to turn baked clay into chocolate loam, something dark and full of promise. Let me sleep until my bones rouse me, jump beneath my skin like hot oil. Then I will get up and dance.
Here's a picture that made Saint Marty's heart dance tonight . . .
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