Sometimes you have to be alone with a dog and the moon

Can't sleep for some reason.
I'm tired, and there's a cuddly sweet lump of boy in bed, but I can hear the wonderful, soothing sound of summer rain drumming on the asphalt outside, and every so often a wink of lightening reminds me that no matter how tightly my thighs grip the mechanical bull, I am so not the one pulling the lever from "graze" to "murderlation".
After everybody was gone from work tonight, and I was all by myself peeling north shore sourdough out of the oven, I started singing out loud.
It's been a long time since I listened to my own voice. I realized I've forgotten most of the songs I used to know by heart. It's sad, sort of like, looking down at the ground and thinking about not tripping over tree roots while you walk, then looking up again and realizing you missed the best parts of the walk, and that parakeet in the tree back there, because you were worrying about the little stuff.
Yeah...I don't know what happened to the vast wasteland of depeche mode lyrics I had at my disposal once upon a time. They all rinsed away down the drain of "shit that I need to worry about because I'm obsessive about being a grown up and getting my life together".
I'm really bad about that lately.
I don't want to go see anybody, and I have the biggest trouble making plans when a friend volunteers to see me. I don't feel as though I have anything remotely interesting to contribute. At work, I listen to my stories. I become irritated as my voice seeks to fill all the hollows and cracks of silence. There is such a blanket of weird when nobody's talking in that place. I just go on and on about nothing. Already I've talked too much about my childhood, growing up weirdness, all that bullshit you don't share with people unless there's a solidly decent bottle of wine nearby, and your hair is literally let down, and with one hand you massage your scalp and gesticulate wildly, while the other bobs the glass of shiraz up and down and all around.
Oh my god.
I have no idea when I last had wine...let alone any decent stuff.
I am coming to the realization that the quality of my life is beyond poverty stricken and romantic. I've careened desperately into boring and paralyzed...at least that's my worst fear.
Three in the morning, not a soul to talk to. No idea what I'd say if I had that soul clutched in my gritty, dough-crusted little fists.
I miss people.
I miss the girl I used to be.
I think I brushed by her a couple of nights ago while the moon was full.
Out on the common, walking Cass at midnight. Threads of black cloud wove the darkness unsteadily enough so that I couldn't read the book I was hauling around with me. Suddenly I became aware of soft strains of violin music coming from somewhere nearby. I followed the sound, until i reached one of the many big old houses split into apartments that make up my neighborhood. Standing across the street from it, I could see the windows of the top floor on the right hand side, lit up and the curtains drawn. The glass itself must have been opened, because I could clearly hear somebody practicing on their instrument.
I stood under the unreliable streetlamp in plain view of the musician, vaguely impressed by the proximity of the funeral home and the shadowy-ness of the entire experience. More than anything else though, I wanted to see the person making the music, and he never appeared. It was difficult to believe that I was anything but alone and enjoying a particularly imaginative auditory hallucination.
I don't think I would mind I were.
At any rate. Solitary violin stalking and the compliment bob gave me on Monday morning are the two things keeping me alive this week.

The Lonelies

Terror has been seeping slowly into my breathing patterns for a while now, this very discombobulating sensation that I am losing losing losing losing pieces and people and places and memories and giant hunks of my own self which drop off as I lumber along barely noticing the itchy spot where I was once complete.
Hi,
my name is terror. I am the bandage you wrap around yourself to keep it all together, and guess what? Now you suffocate.
I sometimes really feel like I no longer breathe. I just anaerobically survive in the placating madness of routine. Somehow, if I just make it through this next hour, I am one hour closer to life being better.
Life being butter?
Forgive the madness...it comes much quicker, much sleeker in the night, in the wee hours, in the lonelies.

Perhaps that's where I should have begun in the first place.

Lonely Mountain

On De Lonely De Mountain,
is a quagmire fountain
a precipice field
and a garden of fleas

Where the quagmire's stucking
the fleas do their sucking
the field unmakes plucking
of the mountains vast seas

So we built it a mansion
a manor of speaking
a house with a voice
and a window that sees

without blinking our fingers
the house made of tinders
is aflame and then cinders
if you only say please

yet no travelers come striding
nor sailers their riding
and the ventured unwinding
their breadcrumb trapeze

so a girl sits unwriting
a song for inviting
and watches all the fleas blighting
under a famine of breeze

come to me someday
and play on the wordplay
i still think of you fondly
and our exchange of disease



goodnight.