Zoo Candles
Excerpt: The hum of existence rides like trains on rails, the gentle rock, the hypnotic sway through a countryside of rolling green and small villages, mountains and curving streams, lapis lazuli skies above Nepal.
I awake to the finale soundings of a dream, pears crystallized by heaven’s lamp of heat and love, the disco spills out onto the street at 4 a.m., stars bungled and bundles above. I lie like a body floating in the bed. I talk to the ceiling, I chat with the windows, I argue with the red walls, I yell at the floor. Scuffling forth toward the day of wood, coffee brews, madmen stew, angels on pyres burn, rainbow wings like volcano ashes, the swimming clouds, the broken bones, the mad shopping frenzy on Holiday eves, the eaves of the neighborhood roofs tinted with a white glaze of frost, Christmas trees chopped and bundled, presents dissected beneath its branches, love a mystery, missing, a flowing and wanting ache at times, other times a wishful hope, a tender kiss, her eyes like blue waterfalls, her warmth beside me, love is more than anything one could ever know, the penultimate leaping circus, the penultimate cherished touch, the penultimate heartbeat.
Some days I think all is lost. Some days the future of life seems slightly bright, like a torchlight in darkness, and those times when I look ahead at a world without me, I wonder where I will be, where will I float endlessly, what colors of the sky will I see, that is, if there will even be a sky. The hum of existence rides like trains on rails, the gentle rock, the hypnotic sway through a countryside of rolling green and small villages, mountains and curving streams, lapis lazuli skies above Nepal, the long valleys of green and ice and towering mountains. That day I found a plastic bag of money outside Kathmandu. It was all foreign to me and I didn’t know how to speak. I ended up in a restaurant and had ravioli and wine. People were laughing, people were covered in ice and bruises. They talked about that earthquake that changed their very existence, changed the landscape, buried souls and dreams and buildings. Everything in life seems lie an aftershock at times.
I wanted to go home. I wanted to fly in a plane and look out the window. The clouds below me instead of always above me. To float on a funeral carpet of magic, to feel altitude changes in my guts, to eat peanuts and choke because my 7-Up was drained. A snoring idiot across the aisle. I couldn’t understand why she was content in missing the blessings of sight and feeling. Where do I float to now? Most of the time I don’t know. Maybe I never know. My guts are restless. These aged guts twisted in agony and contentment at the same furrowed gravity time space. Would it be easier to just be medieval? It’s never been easy. This road we walk upon, these bricks are not always golden.
I looked down out of the plane now. It was finally dark. The planets and the stars were up there in our way. The smear of melancholy lights below atop the Earth, pinpricks of existence, of life, of movement, of pain, shame, being insane. The zoo candles flickering among the fur and cages. The animals howling for freedom and food. They just want to be loved like all the other living things. Love fills the distance between hope and fear. Her blue eyes cast wishes I cannot always fulfill, but they also cast a love I never knew.
