The Last Word (not)

Wild fire grows.

Up, she blows tethered on her-

That was the last haiku.  It was not finished....it read with a mediocre smile, thinking itself a righteous genius (and being right, since it takes the most courage to be mediocre, and then leave it on the page and take the righteous into your life with you, and nothing less).

She  had grown tired of these lessons.  Why scream day after day, when the world wasn't listening.....you point out the trees, palm and captured by the dim electric light of sun and the reflection of the ice in her whiskey highball, and they look upon it for a second, and back to their papers, shuffle shuffle the noises so loud you can't hear them shut you off, or the machine, or the roots in the ground that grew them, or anything that made you stop.  Just stop, and admit the colours are right.

No one kidnapped her.  No one came after her, mafioso style, or snuffed her out, or kept her in dark rooms where that story about the the girl taken in by Frederick Clegg, the house, the isolation, the photographs, tying her up, the forgetting that he didn't do, it wasn't like that at all in the real world.  She simply walked to the railing, that one in the faraway place over the cliff.  And she jumped off.  Silence.  No photographs, no last words, no epitaphs, no ashes, bodies, blood and broken bones, that way the face is sunken when in the casket, that way the memories flow from the liquid place that we cannot control, none of that.  No suicide note.  Just that start to the mediocre haiku, but the one she called her own.  And nothing really matters as much as that fact.  You know the streets around you like the veins in your body, the garden that grows, you made it so.  Invisibility in steel towers has nothing on the provincial knowing that we don't simply get anymore.  This is not urgent, it is simply true.  

My body was found at the foot of that giant tree, swaying and cocking its neck, the clavicle and the dips in the stars, right at the ocean front, but I was happy there.  I left the tops of the vantage points behind...the places where the others stayed, it just wasn't for me.  I always have to jump, that's just the way the road reads the words, and the hours in the day, and the simple sigh that greets every morning's moment until I reached that railing, fully myself and wanting.

The birds shit around the perimeter of my resting place.....I'd like to think one of the more adventurous ones will take that half haiku in its mouth crooked and carry it to the other shore, the one where the sinews click, the hips fuck each other into existence and my words find weight with the sun.  No setting or rising required.  Still, I did it with my eyes open and I found life there, in the battleship between the waves, the sonic boom the fanatical dreams that I've only recorded here, on all of you (all of you).  The thoughts scattered, shit and wind to the clouds, to find a warmer climate and a life worth living.  But still, I blame no one for this.  I'm glad to have come, again, and yes, once more, to the same place.  

I know the birds don't give a fuck about my little nasty haiku, my nimminy pimminy little note....but, perhaps someone out walking in the morning, thinking hard about the way the light hits them, the way life hits them, and how they might intend on hitting back, might bend down and pick up that little, bended and pleated piece of paper, that haiku of a pretentious variety (always with the insults), just make sure to keep that little piece of paper, and promise that you will.  I think every good thing I've ever thought, feel, or been is somehow on there, in the corners, in the dust and dirt, in the elephant ears that I granted, of my own volition.  That's all.  Until next time.  I yield the floor, the dirt, the sand, the old garbage thrown from cars, the used condoms (such a waste they are), and the mountains of regret we all keep in our selves beneath this perfect light we call our lives, to you. The one who picks up this piece of paper.......

M. Lucia