Tell it from your heart, or don't tell it at all

TO COME DOWN ON THAT SHORE

I was wild, but the waves came and flattened me into the ground until I came back a tree, and then the party started for sure.
Hi, I’m Lucy, she said, holding out her hand for a good luck kiss.
I was batman swinging through the branches after she said that, and didn’t come down for ages.
As I held my heart for the longest time like a prayer, I became suspicious, so that after a while I tried to find my way back there to that promise, and found she was gone like the wind blowing over the hard dust of my heart that came to be then to make me miserable.

So I made music and art and painted many poems to say what I felt until it didn’t matter anymore; and that’s when I gave up on the misdirection of the machine and became a monk in the Buddha sayings and threw knives at the door that was far away from me in the future to land where they would.
Well, the future came pretty fast; and falling through the window it danced upon the stairs a whirlwind of amour disguised as nothingness.
Cuckoo, she said down the phone line, raising my hairs.
A pretty good romance this, I thought, and laughed.
You know where to find me, she said into my ear, and danced away before I could find her.
I was all of a sudden trying to remember if I had any clothes on and if I could catch her in the rain.
Bring me my umbrella, she commanded me with the thunderous voice of one who must be obeyed.
OK, I said, and will that be with a side of gin through a straw, or strapped to the bed and groaning?
I will tell you later, she said then to my ears; so I wrapped them up and took them away with me, and jumped up and down in some kind of dance no one had taught me, but it came anyway.
I was the ragged man, the old man, the fool, and then I was the lover and gave my ears away to keep a place in my heart for only that where my love was.

But like a child that reached for the man in the many turnings of life, I became what I could be to escape what I could not face.
We will rough this out later in the rain, after the fall, where we will meet, she said in the waves: to discuss all the bargains we have to propose between us to come to know there is always a place where we are on common ground; and whatever happens then, is sacred.
Are you proposing?
With all my heart.
Then I accept.
I am so happy; let us now go out for tea.
About a Monday later, I found myself in love, and so wrote poems that turned into no more than scratches on my life. I could not be more perfect about this and so swam onwards towards the near future where I was not growing any younger.
Oh, up this blip-stream I swam to swim, and swimming I swam away.
Do you always come here like this, she said, still in the waves?
Yes, and most often like a drip, drip dripping away.

You must be a tap then.
I am not a tap.
Then what are you?
I am where I began coming home.
Oh for the love of all that’s holy, will you please pass over that joint.
My mamma told me never to let go of it.
Well I ain’t your mamma.

I was hoping for snow this Christmas you know.
Don’t change the subject.
I would really love to know what the subject is; oh boy, I surely would.
Maybe it’s not up to you to know more than you do.
Some things are as pure as crystal, and other things are not, so I went out into the dark to see if I could find my beard and grew a bust that said I could never be where I was before.
Blowing a cough I exhaled to victory and carried on, when up came Lucy again, brown from being in the sun too long.
Give me all you’ve got, she said.
I began to give up all hope then and thought about another shore, far away from where I was dying.
And yet the tap is still dripping into the waves of your hope, she said
Eventually I sank beneath the shore of all I was to come back up wild, and growling, and took the place by surprise.
What are you doing down there, she said.
Looking for where I came from, I said, and dived in deep.
Despair comes for those who look for it, said the waves on the shore.
I would have to agree with you, I said: laughing over madly backwards, playing a song of surrender in those waves kissing her every which way.
And then a banging came up from the floor with a voice that followed it that said: I am trying to grow mushrooms here; can you please keep it down up there?
It was a while later that we came down and landed beside each other, from that shore we always wanted to stay in; and for as long as it would have us we drew into each other and faded away.

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