I Want To Show You Everything.
I want to show you everything. The sea turtle patterns engraved on my crabgrass lawn, the spitting image of Willie Nelson in the window dust, the beckoning curve of the bannister lips. The way it is when I’m alone and president. In black and white, I try to reason with the blooming clouds who respond with downright indifference. A surging, speckled green world beneath the surface. Churning below a rainy August afternoon.
I want you to see that I know that I never got it right. I keep being pulled by the tide and wondering how to stay alive. It is all that I am. A buoy, a pencil, a catalyst, a spleen. Not a tool unto itself, but a tool that requires another tool to operate. I swerve across the wood without a steady hand to guide me. While you risk your shirt in a sea of my potential pointlessness, a casino in our washed-up Atlantis.
I want to show you everything. Do you want to see it? Not as a photograph or a story, but as it is. Bristle-faced on the crumbling front steps of my house, arms folded, frowning at the poorly parked cars. (After that, we could go through the milkweed forest that feeds the monarch butterflies. Or pretend we’re disgruntled giants, stomping o’er the postage stamp yard. Or bicker with overbold marigolds, shadowing the bottom of the screen as we watch Ingrid Bergman under the pines. Up on the roof, we will wait for the storming sky net to clear and the Perseids to braid flashing light overhead.)
It could be obsolete and may have no value for anyone, from here until the end of times. As if the meaning of life were a nuisance in pursuit of being swallowed by the electric sea. But if you’re asking out there, if you’re knocking against glass and wondering about the tool at the other end of these words — I want to see it all, too.