January 13th, 2022/independent of dawn-dead dreams

Today’s Prompt: What does your ideal day look like?

My ideal day doesn’t have a face, so I don’t know what it looks like.

/end snark

Honestly, that was my only idea about this prompt. I don’t know what my ideal day looks like, physical form or no. So here’s a poem about some non-ideal daily circumstances I was in a couple years ago (yes, I’m in a better place now):

–

Come in, with the hem of night.

Come along, do a dance for me

in that black dress fraying of twilight.

Beneath the stars, we speak of need

And the rhythm of the sun hears us,

heats us,

wearies us.

–

I will wrap you up in my pretty language, you,

lime the lavish lavender lights hollowing liquid luminescence

and I will blind you to lure you home

under this speckled dome.

–

But, we speak of need

beneath the sun,

dawn catches us in our fever dreams,

wide awake.

A hunger growls in my belly,

quivers my fingers like jelly,

and all the lavender lights leak like sodden meringue.

Substanceless.

Blind you, silence the lion in your stomach,

I drag nothing but my self home starving.

–

Independent of consequences, all idealizations,

I would dance beneath every meteor shower,

under every rainstorm,

lose my breath and catch it again with each vibration of thunder.

Spoken from the mish-mash of dawn-dead dreams,

I need.

I devour

to

survive.

I take and I take and I glut myself with the taking and my living can never be measured with calorie counters or serving spoons, two weeks to empty a milk gallon goes faster than my forgetting how long it took so I buy two more to last four weeks and in the next year of living on my own I need twenty-six for fifty-two weeks, no more, no less, and this is my

independence

this is my

counting crumbs of muffins

and my going to bed hungry

and my bloody noses by lack of iron

and my smoothies with spinach greens

and my skipping dessert by the near-empty candy bag that must never be emptied for the sake of saving myself having to say goodbye

and my cutting myself into a box same shape as an apartment’s walls and a calendar’s squares

because by my independence

I will survive.

I waltz a twilight-hemmed divide: living, surviving,

living amidst lightning stricken storms, surviving inside a barbed box,

but at least from within this box

the lightning paints itself

a lavish lavender light, luminescent, lingering on my eyelids electric lime.