My Pulse, My Pulse, My Pulse

Feel it. Here. Ah yes. Right there. Yes. Right here. Deeper. Go deeper. Beneath this pale skin, behind my blue eyes. Through to me. As sacred as a prayer. With the intensity of a quivering soldier. There’s a reason why they tap the magazines against their helmets. (For safety, my dear boy.) Kneel with your soul and lean in against my shoulder. Cry with the laughter of just having almost fallen. Catch yourself and my breath.

The world is changing. There’s far less poetry in it. But there is. But there is. It’s my turn. I’m tired of mountainous facts that lead nowhere. Yes, I have ambition. Does it have to make sense for it to make sense? Fuck you then. Fuck you and your words and parts of speech and simple narratives that get you everywhere and empty all at once. I stopped sitting tortured at the base of those glaciers long ago. With so far to walk.

But I don’t mind walking. In fact, I like walking. Go ahead and walk that way, kicking the blooms off of flowers and stomping all your angst into little places. I follow at my own pace and make something of those trampled petals. The world was made for so much more than what you’ve made of it. No one will accuse me of making that same mistake. No one will say of me, “she forgot to live.”

I’ve seen Paris, Moscow and Leningrad before the fall of the Soviet Union and Berlin before the wall came down. I sat on the steps of the temple to Minerva in Assisi and I was not unmoved. I slept in the park behind the bullring in Pamplona during the Festival of St. Fermin – the time when young boys run with the bulls to get favor and closer to God. I lay at midnight under a blanket of stars on a terracotta-tiled roof on Majorca de Palma while the warm winds of Africa blew dust across the Mediterranean sky. I turned twenty-one in the back seat of a rental car in Liverpool.

Even I will admit, even now, that it was only in doing something extraordinary that life became ordinary. Can you go any deeper than that? Even I, on a janitor’s wages, once wrote reams of poetry, fell in love and had my heart broke over and over and over again. Right here. Behind my pale skin, beneath my blue eyes. The spaces between the words we don’t say to one another. The deafening scream of the bathroom tiles. My pulse. My pulse. My pulse.