ABCing My Way Back Or Undoing the Hustle
As it's been a spell since a Poppycakes rendezvous with language, I am going back to the beginning, the apes and apricots, the A-frame of assemblage. The approach.
Because what I've missed is magnetic. The way thoughts draw words and words come in flocks and of those many, I need to choose a few, a plan, a point A, a begin-again. That dance.
Collecting thoughts and future shinies to continue. The begin-again mastered, the next dance is The Continue. Which makes me think of
Disco. One of the many weird cultural madnesses we've lived through. The mail-order kit one could procure, the paper cut-outs of shoe prints you'd arrange on the floor, to show your night-fever feet where to go. The first boy I ever kissed mastered those moves. Donned off-white jeans and strutted his newly manly six foot four to the gymnasium floor of our middle school dances. Danced as only one hoping to get laid in Evanston, Wyoming during the disco craze could dance, like a brilliant dimestore Travolta. In memory, so many swoony girls will recall the floor a checkerboard, blinking-squares of colorful light. Blue, red, green, yellow. an ever-Saturday night. But it will be a false memory, the commercial woodish linoleum, the Thursday night, the chaperone teachers, an
Era passing even as that kissable boy-man pointed a finger up to the ceiling across his body down to the floor. He had no kit at home with a pre-made path to show him how to move and where to go. But he believed his body could create well-enough those shapes he studied in the watching and re-watching of the film.
A film, a form, a fleeting fashion, and where I find my way today is less arduous arrangement of paper feet and more trusting the wish-to, the want and the body memory. Call it confidence, faith or sheer
Gumption, but it's a new year again and what to do but rally our greater goods and ask them to lead us? What am I getting at? The goals. The gains. Days will make weeks and months and then a whole bright year that greets us the way a mother's face in the kitchen window might as we hustle in way past our curfew. See that expression? It's concern, but from here it really looks like admonishment.
Hold on. It really needn't be disapproval that our collective-mother-in-the-window-past-self is casting our way. It could just be regard. A word that means consider and concern and yes, the best of wishes. A whole year ago I had some things that I've since lost. Some of them hurt dearly. Some of them needed to hitch their wagons to some other star. A whole year ago I didn't have some things I have now. The have and to hold kind. They're here though. How long they will stay I can't know today.
Icicle, minnow, linger. My three favoritest of words. The ones that remind me why I write when my petty soul-stabs from the fame I don't have, the bikini body I've never, the thises and the that matter less and less can still get to me from time to time. I shan't promise a new me, a thinner me, a better-read or writing dervish of a self. I am here though, and these little insects of letters are skittering across each line and filling the ant farm of the page. There will be more of them. And in the new adventures I get to share with Sweetcakes and with you, Dear Reader, 2017 will be another snowglobe of scenes and happenings and I will gather and curate it in some manner both haphazard and randomly lovely. I will pick it up from time to time and look inside and whatever it is will be a little bit this and a little bit of that. Losses, no doubt, but also, gains. This is the taking-stock market and when we do the numbers, for some of us, writers, artists, anyone who shares that sensibility, it's enough to have paid close attention. Whether I write it down or live it up, I hope to appreciate whatever's next and share some of it here with you.
