Darts in the Dark

I could’ve been an octopus in a heart, sliding across an atrium on slippery veins of slime.  I could’ve wrapped my tentacles around the ventricles, squeezing just hard enough in sharp cadence and counterpoint to the lungs, keeping the body alive.

I could’ve been a gopher in a brain, burrowing deep networks of tunnels where no introspective eye could ever spot me.  I’d settle in like a nesting starling, keeping the synapses entwined and firing on time.  In time, always in a certain amount of time, we give up on the idea of time.  The same thoughts wave a goodbye like clockhands.

I could’ve been the pathogen that devours immunities, the one that lives to kill.  I could’ve undermined the bulworks, weakened the walls, betrayed the keep from within.  I could’ve been the sleeper cell that made all the other cells vulnerable to the army encamped outside.

I could’ve been a lot of things, an endless and unsolvable permutational string of indivisable matrices.

Pinwheeling and pulsating with limitless energy tonight, always tonight, and only tonight.  What fearless warden would brandish a ring of keys and a truncheon before a stampede of the already unlocked?  The footprints on the skeletal ceiling mean someone, somewhere, somehow defeated gravity.  I’m sure he’s teaching the chickens how to fly, and even now a backlit pig whirls and swirls nameless shapes across the sky.

Feckless deer come to call on starving wolves in granite drumlins, every creature gathering quartz, every creature appreciating the crystals like cut diamonds.  A predator eventually finds us and is fattened by fear, tamed only by acceptance of the inevitable and the wisdom to know what things we can grab now, grasp later, and those other stars that lie forever beyond our reach.

Every moment a whetstone, every trial sharpening a serrated edge stabbing at a certain fluid point in the future.  I am sharp enough now, I’d like to think, as a gentle giant throws me in the dark.  Darts in the dark with a bull’s eye that comes and goes, but never on time like clockwork.  Oh, divide and collide, I said to the hemispheres in a constant state of cold war.  That poor gopher is freezing to death, and every frigid thought that courses through the gray threatens to turn furry hands to icicles.

I treated an unlashed raft like a treated saddle, the cinches like deadbolts, the oars like reins, the ebbing tide like a restless horse.

I remember when my parents bodies were jungle gyms, and I could hang on my father’s arms like fruit on a tree, or squirm my way to comfort between my mother and the crevice of the couch.  I remember walking in the high school cafeteria thinking, knowing, that someone will make me believe in god, any god, when I wake every morning to love’s steady breathing.  I remember remembering to take time to enjoy the scenery.  To revel in it.  I remember the lissome way the ballet unfurled across the horizon.

I told them to meet me in the park with blindfolds and a board, and that we’d throw darts in the dark.  The god of serendipity owes me a bull’s eye or two.