Shaking You

You are bruised by the world, a little broken.  And you come to me, tired; you bring your burdens in the form of stories, torturous tales of loss, regret, fear.  You bring to me words, words, and more words.  You bring a vocabulary you have rehearsed in the deep hours of your dark night, rewriting your childhood, your father's death, your lover's betrayal.  As if you are stringing the beads of a new kind of a rosary, aligning the words to blurt out or blather, you have chosen these words carefully.  The curling letters, the cursive smoke--cancerous, burning, a dragon's urgency in your breath--comes out of you, the fire of your own certainty that you have been wronged, or wounded, or worked to your last raw nerve.  There is nothing that tethers you to the world but your pain, or so you imagine, or so you etch on the monument you are making to your misery.  And you will carve each last letter into granite permanence even as your every finger bleeds and bleeds...

Let go of these words.  They are the weight that is sinking you.  They are the cement that prevents you from swimming, from flying, from laughing, from making love.  Don't believe them.  Words are wasted on trying to "make sense" of this world, of this life, of this struggle.  Feel your way through the obscure passages, the labyrinth; feel your way without giving names to your feelings, without dissecting their meaning.  Your feelings are more immediate than your words would have you believe, more present that psychology or novels conceive them.  You do not take pleasure in the sun because of some dumb luck of where and to whom you were born.  Likewise, the frustrations of daily living--the flat tire, the cold coffee, the failed flirtation--are not seeded in genes or dreams or traumas.  These are the breezes of today, the sensations of now.  Breathe today's anger and tomorrow's lust without linking these into some kind of eternity.  Words are a timeless malady.  Life is a temporary gift.