Scroll of Jawns / Ep. 8

Melancholy were the sounds on a winter's night.
- Virginia Woolf

jawn one.

I cling to my defenses but at what cost? When I find myself up against a proverbial wall, jacked there by someone or something that feels like its threatening my state of mind/ my peace/ my paradigm/ or my power, what else have I got? It’s my defenses that come around. It’s my defenses that step gingerly out of the alley shadows/ lookin’ tough/ frontin’. How do they manisfest? Oh I don’t know. Does it ever really matter? I mean, if my defenses are acutely tuned into the universal wavelengths, they’ll help me out, right? But what if they ain’t? What if a person’s defenses are all convoluted by their own experience and no matter how hard they try to force themselves to adapt fresher cleaner methods of self-protection, they just can’t swing it? In some cases, my defenses ask me questions in the heat of the moment and for that I am eternally grateful. There’s nothing better than being able to have a little tet-a-tet with your deeper consciousness right smack dab in the middle of big decisions about to be made. It’s a sign of immense growth in the tale of anybody, trust me. No one is born being able to check in with themselves upon times of strife. It’s quite the opposite actually; human beings, by the by, are no different than, say, mountain lions or squirrels when it comes to navigating perceived dangers. It doesn’t really matter either if those so-called dangers are actual murderers looking to flat out take us down or your own kids looking to bamboozle you with Tier 7 psychological warfare. The reaction is rooted in the defense. And my defenses are rooted in my past. So I cling to my defenses, hold them like the sword that protects me from pain, because guess what? That’s exactly what they do. But at what cost? And what on Earth is the alternative?

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jawn two.

The natural occurrences in my chest seem strange and familiar to me at the same time. I get a butter flutter sometimes/ this slow worm kicking it in my arteries by my heart. What you cannot see within the confines of your own body is mesmerizing and tantalizing. There are moments when I long to be clear: like an old milk bottle or one of those vintage clear push button phones. This would fully allow me to look down at my own skin and witness the comings and goings of health and illness. Of life, I suppose, as it unfolds in real time. And death, I’d propose, as it wiggles its way into me, ushered in, in total darkness, by the small time crooks who guard the spreading cracks of time. Am I actually feeling high blood pressure? Is that possible to sense a tiny fist forcing its way through the noisy tubes of my system? And if it is and everyone knows it and I’m just dumb about medical things, well, isn’t that kind of cool in a macabre sort of way? I mean, at some point I’m going to be done. And the knowledge that that day is coming isn’t lost on me either. I tend to think about it probably more than most, I guess. Not because I’m cut out of more stoic or poetic cloth either. Hell no. It’s more, I think, that I’m afraid, just like all of us, but also fascinated too. How will I know? What will I feel? Lying in bed one night this week/ agitated by life forces beyond my control/ pissed off by something I probably could steer better if I tried harder/ I found myself pondering this creeping sensation down inside my heart’s cavity. It was slightly painful and somewhat alarming on the surface of things, but it also seemed to be a reminder to me that I am a ticking time bomb. And there are fuses lit down in me/ some only recently sparked/ others that have been burning long off in the distance/ like rebel campfires across the dark starry river. Why can’t we celebrate our own demise before it comes along? Why can’t we take our sadness and our fear and hold them in our cupped palms, examine them like the natural things/ the dare-I-say wondrous things they are. Isn’t my impending death the same in a way as a lovely autumn leaf? Or a cold palmful of creek water? Isn’t the whole idea of my chest being filled with wee hard workers sent to pack up my stage and move my show out, isn’t that, in a lot of ways, just as brilliant… just as glistening with crystal shine as a mountain lion’s tracks in the fresh fallen snow? Or even a squirrel’s? What am I afraid of? What are you so scared of? There’s a blood clot moon shining down on all of our fields tonight.

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