Pillow Kombat with the Ultimate Sleep Fighter Those who say they "sleep like a baby" haven't got one. --found fortune cookie proverb Like in a video game, size does nothing to decide advantage:--my demure son throws his demure weight around our family bed with resolve, and so I revolve inside discomfort's orbit, the planet of my sleepiness demoted, dwarfed--unstudied! Just as I reach my parental threshold of self-denial, just as I go to reinstate the matter of physics-- energy and force --he executes his special move: a combo of lovey words struck half-consciously across the dark, launching me into another vain-cycle search for deep space shuteye. Then his favorite toy sheep tucked between my folded arms (FINISH HIM!). Then the fresh delicacy of his foot plopped upon my forehead (FATALITY). The Fidelity of Music It took time and travel to understand how the word father sings to me in all languages--: I want daddy, but father-abuser crosses the notes or keys I believe have barricaded the badness of that man. I hear father-addict in the damn silence. Of course, my whole- hearted hope had no chance, which I should have known once I learned guitar--the first instrument I tried to turn against him: riffed father-liar, plucked father-thief. But for each piece of music I make into a door for daddy's return father-deserter has orchestrated, without warning, another empty house of Blues.
Do you hear what it means for me to sing my son to sleep? Hear the Light --at The Giant Heart (Philadelphia, PA) Today the boy won't rest long enough for me to burn a single metaphor back to whether precision or prayer leavens the language I need cast into the well of our survival. And then the boy urges my turn to stay poised on a floor scale while watching 24 chilling cups of hurt-colored liquid spill into a clear cylinder. The gutted window to the privacy of blood harbored in this body thins the daily belief that no sick imaginary could cut us full open. And then the boy gawks around a carousel of animal hearts, fidgets against his surprise at the lesser of the lion's carnal engine beside the cow's. Before I can weigh the un-chambered bellows of hunger, the boy begins to sound a panel that plays the pulse of each beast. He doesn't linger with a blood-music; he keeps mashing buttons at random--from the canary's constant lift to the cavernous crawl of the blue whale--until I can't see living inside a god-rhythm that soothes this earthly cacophony pleading toward the dark effort of tomorrow. By now, I have a strange image for heart filling my mouth. I'm remembering the tiny fleshy pyramids my own father cleaned from sunfish.
When they ceased their tight contractions, I strained to recognize the heart-ness in his hand, sometimes pressing down into the soft plunge of his palm to witness one last lunge. This memory dissolves because the boy dashes off, and then I'm chasing him through the beating corridors of a giant vascular room. The way is dim and narrow--: I'm working hard to keep up. I'm trying not to lose the boy inside the heart. But every time I hear the light of his laughter murmur across another distance, I breathe into the blessing his life has kindled from the space between us:-- I think I could survive like this all day.