In One Ear
Day Twenty of Thirty Days of Writing

I nearly crumbled…
Tonight the moon is heavy.
The pipes upstairs fill with wasted water and travel through the walls down into the unfinished basement. My neighbor’s feet creak on the ceiling. Something is dropped to the hardwood floor. The refrigerator starts humming.
I made a list. I will spare you the details, but right now I want to do each thing on this list twenty times over but I won’t do a single one. It is a kind of abstinence list, in honor of the full moon. Not really, mostly coincidental, mostly because I’m not sure I believe in coincidence.
I had a dream about a pregnant moon that shone brightly over the ghetto. Young faces and stammer voices rose up to the white light. My friends and I rode towering elephants through the streets, their legs stretched like lampposts, straight out of Dali. The concrete slabs were riddled with cracks and lined with weeds. Orange lights burned inside of windows, and children crowded around to sing in words I did not understand.
Ghetto Moon, I titled my poem about my dream. The frizzly haired elder liked my title. Hers was about the moon too, what it, blue, was bluets, moan… no… it was No. Moon. The street didn’t know anything was amiss… but I knew this moonless night was like none other. Those elongated elephants and whimsical wackos were nothing but a tirade. Is that right?
And here we are tonight, a fool moon, a list of please don’t do this anymore, though I can’t really see any reason to stop. Doesn’t everyone love a loose tongue and a sly smile as something warm slips into their bellies? Demands descend down from the top, and when those are rejected, persuasion, compromise, just this once, one more time, I swear, just one more. I know an act, but find myself playing along all the time. We all want the same thing. I think.
Tight lips sink ships. Is that a non-innuendo? When you talk to yourself, do you hope someone is listening? Sometimes I put myself on display. I find the shadiest corner of a room and put my back to the wall and wait. An hour goes by. Nothing happens. An hour is lost forever. It isn’t just any room though. It is a late night, rowdy raucous that trips over itself and vomits in the alley. There isn’t a single reason to be here, except that I have an imagination sometimes and find myself daydreaming at odd hours.
It is the humans. I am drawn to them like a moth. I careen recklessly into their faces, land on their shoulders and crawl about until I’m swatted away. My sister is terrified of moths and their kamikaze pilots. Also crickets and their ability to swarm. I can hear them now, singing alongside toads and ricochet bats. I just want to talk.
Don’t lie. I want so much more. More than what anyone can give me. I find myself falling in love with rabbits in the yard. For a long time they stay frozen when they notice me, but after a while they realize I am not immediately a threat, and continue grazing upon the long grass. Her ears twitch at every word I regale her with. Her cheeks circulating and her nose detecting discrete bits of information on the wind.
Mostly the moon because of cycles. If we begin at certain point in a cycle, we can then gauge our level of success. If I were to last from moon to moon, I might have something to look forward to. That is, if I happen to look up occasionally and remember there is a moon, and a vast sky riddled with thumbtack stars, and there a puddle, and there a cobweb in the corner, and there a life worth giving your eyes, at least for second, and your ears to listen to their story, and anything you have at all that you can spare, because isn’t there something we all desire?
An earlier version of myself suggested to do away with calendars all together. What good is August the 8th if it has happened millions of times already? Is today not a new day? (Incoherent rambling ensues)
A woman smokes cigarettes at a picnic table and smiles at me. I am warm and buzzing. She says she has an injury that causes her to forget words, and often she must place herself in “timeout”, an extended period of silence, to recollect herself. Aphasia is the word I cannot remember at the time. A failure of word retrieval, an inability to express oneself verbally at times.
I have been debating such an extended silence. To refuse my voice for an entire year. Starting now-
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She’s says no, I mean for real, a head injury… right out the window.
