if it was not

It's in my head.  Like an octopus it wriggles about.  Silky tentacles sliding into patulous caverns.  I close my eyes and I can feel its meaty mass taking up space. 

Shifting as I shift.  It leans with me as I lean forward.  It leans with me as I lean back. I glance sideways and like a child on a rail, it pushes up the side as if it is trying to see out beyond me. 

Its porcine mirror casting a feverish flight of vertigo with each move I make.  Its insistence threatening to topple us both; I want it extracted. 

Standing on a winter's beach, I want to wash in the waves its miry ink from my shoulders.  Slip its breathing body from my ears. Remove its branching reach from my eyes.  But I fear if I were to dip my head towards the water its weight would drag me down.  

Before me a steely ocean; cold wind mixing spray with skimming clouds. It is beautiful.  It is dangerous.  It is sleeping but alive.  A narrow shoreline sheltering between scaling cliffs.  Dark sand stretching tight around foot prints pooling with water.  No black jutting rocks, no white glimmering shells, barely a horizon to paint.


If it were not for the battle with the octopus this beach would be my silence. I could roll up the sandy cuffs of my jeans and wade into the water as far as I want.  I could become still against the tide, one-sided, faceless to the world behind my back.

If it were not for this thing like an octopus, if I was without its parasitic corpulence, I could step lightly without thought, without strategy.  I would not be a watcher.  I would not be a collector of love like nightfall.  Sweet, haunting love that exchanges long cast shadows for total darkness.  Love that lingers and grows darker just before it fades away- always threatening to return. 

 

If it were not for the octopus I would not have enough ink to write. Or enough reason to keep running.

Being part of the turbulent ocean is nothing to an octopus. Being part the stubborn land is nothing to the dead.  But somewhere between them is a way up and a way down.  Between them is the whole blue sky; clouds rolling in like breakers, sunlight falling like rain.

If it were not for the octopus I would be sleeping instead of dreaming.