confetti

the confetti doesn’t fall from the sky, and it surely never falls very far at all, not unless the wind sweeps up, but even then it doesn’t fall nearly far enough to be lost, but it does fall far enough for any old boy or girl celebrating another new year in the city, all those lights, all that spectacle, the pickup truck bed off highway three-ninety-five, all those loose leaves falling right onto the horizon and sticking like a january storm, falling like the lights on lovers’ bedrooms,  all that confetti whooshing around this town and country washing machine, and even though it is forced into falling, not much unlike yourself, it is not the falling that is important, it is something else, it is kind of like that day when you launched off the swing set in the third grade from what seemed like three stories up and you hung there right before takeoff, that last second, when it is too late for even the astronaut to call it off anymore, when you let go, when you flew for what seemed like the interminable ride to your grandmother’s house when you were five years young, before the walkman even fit over your budding skull, before the satellites that race above us now were even conceived, that long foreign drive that seemed like it took a carriage and six horses three days to cross the dry desert in old western fashion, because you didn’t know if that mirage would ever separate, because you didn’t know if there would ever be water again, and then all of a sudden, that blur of the world before you stammering into razor-sharp concussion, when pluto and neptune collide, when you felt the shatter of that delicate sand in your heels, rising up into your shins, your stomach pitting, and into the depths of your eyes, that explosion of sand, the excruciating, the sharp magnification that I am not invincible, as it pierces you and brings you to your knees, yearns to let out through the sodium of the lacrimal sac, the other children standing around laughing and pointing their fingers, all because those hands sunk so low toward the earth they might have scraped their knuckles against the gravel top, and dug up that propulsion of potential force against the very weight of our existence, that kinetic movement, only to be expelled in the only emotion that made any sense, at the hilarity of it all, the ridiculous contraption towering above your broken body, the infinitesimal grains supporting your affable weight, that which lifted you, that which will bring you down just as well, and it is always easier for the sun to set, but still it awakes with a subtle grin and if you listen hard enough you can hear the delicate sound of thunder erupting from their fiery chests, that their cactus is really no different, and when the thunder blares its sirens, we know that it never means to alarm children or cause a fright, but that this time, it happened to be you, it happened to be you falling, and that lightning is just a reaction, and not a genetic code can describe this, and a typewriter at the hands of mad primates will surely never know the sound of that heart beating at twice its rest, the racing thoughts and the indescribable emotions therein, that feeling as it races into you, picks at your very self, that you are the center of attention, the center of the entire fucking universe, albeit a poor display, a haphazard construction zone a lot like the los angeles freeway system, adapting to a future already passed, a champion, a failure, a nobel peace prize winner, a three-strike felon at the hands of a black hood, at the hands of potential triumph as it is washed into the storm drain quicker than a guttural sound, at the long-winded drum of the tibetan monk, at the hark of her voice, and you humor them, you humor them as the girl who watched the tragic display unfold from the swinging belt next door, clutching the steel chain harder than you because she could see every blemish of position, timing, lateral thrust, vertical trajectory, speed, the eighty-five degree angle of your knees leading up to the launch, your eyes as they winced, and your hands as they grew whiter around the edges of your pinky, and your knuckles, your knuckles as they flattened into the back of your hand on release, at the freedom, and she could do nothing but watch this whole strange occurrence, the girl in the pink dress who scraped her feet against the sand, dirtied up her hush puppies, and her mother will scold her indefinitely when she steps off the bus later that day, but a pair of shoes never return anything, because today is just like any other day, and after the scolding, she will line them up with all the other perfect shoes, because she knows the pain you feel and she grabs your arm for the first time, and you feel that undeniable sensation, the warm rust-covered finger, the steel palm press against your juvenile skin, and you know you will be okay, you know that this feeling will pass, and their fingers will soon be inside their noses again or maybe in their pockets, perhaps holding chalk or a number two, rolling pocket lint, and you know that the confetti is just a bunch of cut up human beings flying through space, and we all fall down, together, some faster than others, some twisting up in the air and hanging on into the wee morning, some seemingly banished so far away you can barely see them, some you may never see again at all, and some that fall just as they are supposed to, but the thing you know the most, and the thing that brings you comfort is that you know they are there and you know there was once a sheet they were all cut up from, and that this sheet came from a ream that came from a box from a paper company who was probably a middleman who bought twenty pallets of that paper from a large industrial supplier who bought the paper from a paper treatment facility who bought truckloads of trees that came from a logging company and one of those trees on one of those trucks was cut down by your best friend from college that you never spoke to again because he stole your girlfriend in your sophomore year and that girl, who was the girl in the pink dress, said goodbye to you and kissed you on the forehead when she walked out of your bedroom for the last time, and said she was sorry in the same voice she spoke in when she touched you for the first time when you were in the third grade, and they live in a city not too far away from you right now, and you heard they were unhappy, and that they are going through some rough times, and how childish is it that instead of picking up that phone and calling her, you sit in your room alone feeling resentment or the bile of the morning, reading some insane rant comparing telescopic emotions to microscopic event chasms that are really only a fabrication of the truth, and quite possibly a lie altogether, because everybody knows the two are completely different but somehow everything is still related, kind of like birds and bees, or men and women, and nobody knows the real reason why they fit together, why that heart in your chest is a botched perpetual motion machine, why it one day stops, but nobody can afford the time to compute the ratio of how many protons or nuclei there are to planets or suns, and how to function in all the asteroids and comets and meteors, and all the cosmic dust and maybe a dozen other dimensions that don’t respond to these sensations or words, but they are important, and we have a photograph, and that is all we need to remember, and so we compute batting averages and processing power on super computers and portable universes, and there is nothing wrong with that at all because at least we are doing something, even if we are only building up plaque or skyscrapers, and maybe an asteroid could be a lot like a batting average or the sears tower, maybe it is more like a vine of grapes or that perspective sixty miles per hour trying to catch the end of the row, and maybe it could kill your career in an instant, but think about how many of those leaves never amount to anything and just burn off with the paper, think about how many of those suns never get to have all those eyes that are open, all those eyes that are sleeping, all those eyes that are running all over the arc of the globe chasing even the smallest tic of a glimmer of hope and maybe that is all you are, and maybe that is all you are not, and all those eyes that are hardly ever caught staring off into the horizon, and all those ones that are, the ones that are anxiously awaiting the rising, not a lot unlike yourself, and not unlike how you think in the back of your mind, all those neurons firing around incomprehensible gray matter, and it doesn’t matter what it is, and it doesn’t matter what it really does, but what does matter is this: how that ride to your grandmother’s house didn’t take nearly long enough, and that there wouldn’t be another, no, there won’t be, and that is okay, and you will be okay with this, if not now, one day you will be, because you know your grandmother jumped when she had to, because your grandmother, too, stared at those pulsating grape vines, because you were a part of that photograph, you are a part of it even if you are indiscernible, even if the picture is gone altogether, because one day there won’t be any more swing sets anymore. because an overwhelming majority of the hospitals’ reports linked swing sets and hand injuries together, because of plastics and kickbacks and scale of economies, because of embargoes and wars and bread, and because you picked up the phone, because you weren’t afraid to let go, because you didn’t settle back into that perfection of a pendulum, safe, and without a trumpet to break or sound, because you blew it loud, because you sounded the baroque sound of humility, the laughable prediction that the world will still turn itself around without you, and all because of, all for the girl in the pink dress for whom you jumped, for whom you hoped to impress, for whom you failed, for whom you think you may have failed to impress, and who knows if would have never asked her, but unmistakably, for whom you risked everything, for just that split-second sensation of launching yourself into the unknown, and you could’ve ended up saying a million things, a million excuses, swept up all the confetti and hid it under a rug or lit a match, self-immolated, said fuck-it and walked away, and people read and write and say and do a lot of things, but nothing here is new, just a collection of old words and a bottle of whiskey, so it all must boil down into identifying with one of our past literary performances, because there are hundreds of thousands of metaphors and similes, and a million liturgies, and nearly seven billion smiles, but there is only one you, and you woke up yourself again, and you are the center of the universe, at least for now, but so am I, and so if she and so is he, so say to that shape in the mirror right now, say it like you mean it, like one of those choose your own adventure books, say “don’t try,” turn to page forty-one, you took a bunch of sleeping pills, and died, or say “everything was beautiful. nothing hurt,” turn the next page, and keep reading, the story isn’t over yet, fuck, say both, say neither, maybe this is a new chapter, or a new book on the shelf, fuck, maybe this is a new bookcase, axial coordinate, or spatial plane, write your own, just don’t decide later, because there is only right now, because later turns into unlikely very quickly, and the swing set is getting scarce, the motion too much to force, soon, all that confetti will just snow down and cover you right up, and you will disappear, and they will ask you, do you remember the earth, and you will, because there is hardly a thing in all known existence that is completely black or white, how many colors can you see, now, because the wind doesn’t stop blowing, no, not for you, because you are your own worst lawyer, but decide now, this one is black and white, and the million shades of gray are just your declining hair, so decide now, jump or perpetuate the pendulum, now, go ahead, read, write, say, do whatever it is you want, this is your story, now, go on and jump, I can’t promise we will catch you, but even if you fall, we will surely spread out our hands and twist and dance and scream around the soil with each other soon enough!