Rolling in Rivers

This year has been my turn at garden variety anxiety. You know, confrontations with life and death and all that. (Sometimes backwards and sometimes in that order.) So, when the going got tough.. I stuck to the path of minimal resistance. For the first time, in a very long time, I just wanted to sleep forever: fall into the gaps between consciousness, a place that's warmer than a hedgehog's belly. 

I started reading too much into horoscopes, assigning importance to things with skills to scan minds and sell destinies. For the first time, in a very long time, I wanted to hand it all over: take the baby, take the money, take the spoon. I don't want this responsibility. I don't want to mother or work or feed. I don't want all this damn freedom.

So with Mercury in retrograde, for the first time, in a very long time, I pay homage to everything backward in the backwaters of my mind: that Deep "Hypnotic" South, a place of hummingbirds and lazy sunsets. Somewhere in that Louisana, right in the bowl of my skull, there's just a rocking chair and rocks; sounds that are soft or clunky, but nothing in between. A lying lullaby that hushes the roofie off. (Did I mention that sometimes boys remind me of drugs?)

I heard someone say that they have crocodiles down here. Yeah, that's right. Somebody told me that when you lie in the jaw of crocodile, you won't be alive long enough to hear the snap and thrash of gnashers and teeth.

But, you know me. I'm still here, lying in this jaw, waiting for that sound.