Soulspace

Soulspace

it’s the Big Bird pajamas, the only memory before 5, the bottoms of the matching set
and how toddler life is a little backside covered in baby blue bloomers
with skinny legs popping out like a small bird, the irony

it’s railroad ties in the backyard, only five feet high when I visited Gateswood Drive
as an adult and the deep laughter followed by tears when I remembered them
as the Mount Everest only my male siblings could climb

the bicycle from 1982 on that warm Christmas when no one had ever heard of testing out a bike-gift in December and the thought that Jesus himself had blessed the blue 10-speed and each ride around the block was another prayer of thanks

damn, if it isn’t the slumber party of 1986 after reading a Judy Bloom book
and the novelty of whispering in a group of pre-teen Catholics, “I masturbate,” and the silence that followed all the way until morning and the cruelness of them, and well,

the fact that I really didn’t even know what it was but my desire to make clever conversation from a book I read took over and testing out a new word was more pleasureable than the activity I would not discover until well into the 1990’s

and it’s The Scarlet Letter and Hester Pryne and To Kill a Mockingbird and eventually Longfellow and Plath and that professor from the community college who turns out, now that it’s 2006, I see was probably a guy just like me

the times I wake in the night and pull my car over and whisper over and over to rememebr when I don’t have a pen and the keyboard I think will need attention when I pound on it, the sound of it better than the rain in the attic downing out lover’s moans

the Times New Roman or Arial depending on the disposition and the moon and the flow of what needs to be purged to make room for more-
the ache to share it but to hold it like babies in the wind