Throw Me a Bone

Throw me a bone. Hand me a prompt, a set of words, a place to start, a seedbed or maybe just a seed. Tag me It and push me out from this place of big margins. I don’t need much. Just a few syllables, a sentence fragment even, like this one. Remind me that the weather has a skin, a voice, and some days wings and talons for gripping. Hand me a pencil you found in the hallway. I won’t mind the toothmarks or the empty pocket of air where the eraser used to be. I don’t plan on making those kinds of judgments anyway. Put on some music, something that sounds like something it isn’t: a string that hums like a friendly old machine or a reed that burbles like boiling water. I won’t need anything else. No slices of apple to lick clean of peanut butter, no salty chips to hear crunch while I think. no black tea to befriend until it’s strong and cold, like the big sky we saw that night at the orchard, a fierce and reachless bowl of stars with a flavor like that of sugar on metal. Just this: a shove, a nudge, a chord, a frame, a word. A smallness, waiting to grow layers, to disturb, sing, fracture, collide, transform, and humble. You won’t get back what you gave me but something else instead: a joke where solemnity once lived, a pile of fragrant sawdust where you used to have a two-by-four, a puzzle thrown askew until the spoons and hollows of its picture make no sense at all to the eye you’re used to seeing them with. You’ll have to learn to solve its riddle with another sense, one you might not know you have yet. Not a third eye, but a shudder that alchemizes and translates from just beneath your ribcage and doesn’t mind the scattershot way it has to work to collate and harvest what the world gives it. When you’re ready, you’ll find an ark, a big ship ready for sailing on the roughest mythical seas your storytelling soul can plant and nurture. I’m ready when you are.