When Life Feels Like a Bailbondsman
It is useless to say you didn’t do it.
He’s about ten times bigger and not listening so when, after a bruising tussle, he clamps you onto a narrow board, and ties on, for good measure, an old army blanket, it’s probably best to just go slack.
To breathe deeply, except, you know, when he funnels that board into the back of an old station wagon, the motor gusting. Then you might just want to hold your breath. The blanket is your friend there.
As the board clunks against the lift gate, steel your spine against the rat-a-tat-tat, ruts in metal. Most important of all, keep, if you can, a positive outlook.
Okay, it’s hard. You hurt. It scratches.
It may help, in this regard, to think of fall leaves, the swish of your feet through dried color, the warmth of a borrowed sweater, the childhood wonder of a picked-off scab.
Cold nights, when, with the seats froze stiff, the roughest wool was somehow a picnic.
Snow blue mornings when, socks on, the whole world echoed orange.
Oh sure, it’s not ideal. Your eyes glitter in the olive scritch, but the wool smells at best like rotting grass, a field where you once fell, maybe not laughing; the board sunken rocks in that field.
Still, now as the road rumbles in steady bumps, just see if you can’t find stars–there through the coarse-grained weave, through the tan of car roof, through that outer blanket of night–
Just see if you can’t feel the wind rifling your hair, sluicing across your skin–how can the wind make it through a blanket you ask? How does it caress your cheekbones, lying flat?
You’re overthinking it, I say, telling you to just feel the freedom, and you groan, oh sure, maybe the wind is free.
And who are you anyway, you ask accusingly, to talk about all this shit.
And I sigh from the next board over, the next clump of coarse blanket, and confess, with some embarrassment, that it is just possible they will charge us with conspiracy.
But don’t worry, I add, we didn’t do it.
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Here’s I-don’t-know-what kind of a piece, posted for no current prompt; just for fun of sorts. Have a good week. I am en route to city and office life tonight. (I swear that was not the inspiration for this piece!)
ManicDDaily 
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