LEFT WITH RHYTHMS TO BLEED TO AND BEAT TO

In the beginning you skipped around my small chest, giddy at fresh air, the first light on my face and cradle of arms.

When I was seven and in surgery for a broken elbow, the surgeon noticed your playfulness, yen for funky rhythms, syncopation.

When I was 14, I spent afternoons at the hospital with my shirt off, for machines and doctors to monitor your erratic behavior. And too often on the edges of consciousness you come to me as a hummingbird. I rest my hand on your cage and feel the vibration of 1200 beats per minute where I should the gentle thump of 60.

And I wanted to say that I can’t sleep when I hear you, especially when I hear how frantic you are at the loss of the day, or maybe it’s not the loss of the day, maybe you’re heavy from the boxed mac n cheese, or maybe it’s the burden of responsibility that makes you wild. No matter, I can’t sleep when I hear you beat.

Who are you racing? You wake me up trying to lose my dreams, tangling my guts.

Thump. Thump. I walk to you. two. three. four. I count my breaths to you. I try not to count to you and empty my mind.

But what I really wanted to tell you is that when you chase me around my head at night, I think about the day I’ll miss you. For now, you keep seeping in, letting worries leak into the repose, and I’m lost in the melody. Thump. Thump.

A heartbeat is felt on the left side of the chest because the left ventricle of the heart is larger and stronger than the right. It is responsible for pumping blood to the whole body, and the right pumps only to the lungs.

When I sit up straight and close my eyes I see you in my left, you play with the light that leaks through my lids. The music of vision.

On the beach he lay on the sand and his arm held me in place on his chest. I almost melted at his heartbeat, fell into ease at his, the way I fall into insomnia at my own. How many are in this position right now? He wondered into my hair. Lovers, mothers and father’s and children, grandparents and grandkids. And the assuredness of his heart felt infinite. I heard in his pulse the descent into sleep, and I let my consciousness go too.

But I really ought to say I admire your honesty or at least your persistence.

I had to speak. I am fine. I am fine. I was fine. It wasn’t my fault, it was yours. Of course, you are me. I opened my jaw and wasn’t sure when to stop and it kept going and it stretched into a gaudy grin, hit the podium and the introduction fell, but all I heard was you, screeching in time.

I watch my shadow dance around me, imitating my form, corrupting gestures, shrinking, and growing dark presence. In two light sources my shadow ruptures, fission of the bodily umbra, exposition of my northern and southern and I swear one always looks more familiar than the other and one always walks away, sometimes the familiar, sometimes the stranger.

But you can’t walk away, and you remind me of this oddly, inconsistently, flushing my cheeks with mortality. I press my hands together in prayer and feel your music between them, within them, and wish into mystery for contentment, strength, ease. May I be and may you be.

There’s an unconquerable distance in the recondite tract of throat and jaw, nose, and brain, noticed in cues to relax, moments of meditation that release tension with intention of clarity. But you drum incessantly. When something is wrong your music swells and rushes, collecting rain of disquiet, and the unwavering thuds cause rampage in my hands. They sweat and shake, seismic fumbling, wooly fingertips dropping the bag of tea, chamomile coating the kitchen floor, my heart sinks, no, my pulse continues to bang.

But what I really want to say is that I think you lie to me. You don’t share the consciousness of my brain, though you animate its concepts in dance and walking and writing; it gives you reasons to dance. So why do you make me choke, cleave composure I’ve built like a Jenga tower, precariously rearranging conceptions of self, that topple in the quake of your increasing beats per minute? You’re in my ears while I speak, and I wanted to tell you that I know I am alive, there’s no need to pelt me with it while I’m reading aloud. Why do you work my mind into a fit with no good reason?

You give music to the places where I long for silence, silence I won’t meet, because you and your restless rhythms are in me, are keeping me dancing.

Pulse touches 60,000 miles of blood vessels, more than twice the circumference of the Earth. It’s a miracle our veins aren’t more tangled in each other’s, though I suppose that’s one use for bodies.

How long would it take to walk all my blood vessels, stepping to lentil len-til len-til.

I see my heart all over when my stomach palpitates and neck throbs with the rolling beat. When I’m breathing heavily and you are sprinting, my wrist writhes.

And I wanted to express that sometimes I can’t think and all I have is you, cupping my head in my hands, figuring out how to pull poetry from a pulse. Words get captured in the rhythm, sticky, infectious, the kin of tune, waltzing, appendage, quilt, quilt, quilt, a skosh of vinegar, somewhere hm hm hm hmmm hm, beyond the sea, autobahn, len-til, persimmon, len-til, len-til. if i if i if i…

Sometimes you’re all I have, you are the heart of the matter, but you manifest in my fingertips and knees, hoarding the ache to create.

As movement you are music, constant, washing in measurability the essence of beloved and time. Ticking like an internal clock and being the heart of the matter. You are a conductor, your baton the aorta, you are the movement the rhythm life is dependent on. Continuallyaudible and reflective; you’re a musician of relationality.

Sometimes I feel you in my grown chest so intensely I am outside myself, becoming the waves you erupt as they swirl around me in blues and reds, sucking oxygen, needing release.

But what I really wanted to tell you is that you are lovely. I wanted to say that sometimes I can’t sleep when I hear you and sometimes that is ok, because your rhythm is ceaseless prayer, the ever-present opportunity to hold the time I have in my two hands as a book, or in my breath as I walk, or in the hands of another, whose pulse is in my own. len-til. len-til. persimmon. len-til