Inventory II

I don’t know a better word for it than “inventory;” it’s as if someone had taken stock of a marvelous collection of things and, unable to name them, had taken to inventing terms for them and called it an “inventory” to represent them, to describe them in such a way as to bring them to solid, stolid life.

So: let us then start below the waist, down low.

Both my feet are numb, numb as dead sparrows, though the right one still raises a wing a bit now and then. The left one laughs at its pretension, and feels the full weight of its own death (be that as it may; maybe “death” has better things to do than name a dull foot) upon the cold wooden floor.

My left hand continues the trend. It still holds on to “numb” as its descriptor; what better word is there? The fingers grow colder each day — some days less so, as if the dial gets turned up now and then.

I try to play guitar and the clumsiness of it overwhelms me, like a football sack or a thug in the alley; the alley out back, behind the club; the music playing loud inside.

Maybe a couple, lithe and young, steps out here for kissing and such? They don’t see me.

I snap back to it — to the useless guitar. The useless hand. My right hand, I tell myself, is fine at least. I lie about that as I strain to put the guitar back on the rack; it’s not fine. It’s not fine, not at all…

Whenever I walk I step a little and stagger, now and then; dragging the left foot.

I have some small trouble with the stairs; up and down, nothing in my arms, nothing in either hand or the balance is tossed aside. I am relieved at the top of the staircase; I have climbed the mountain, the hill with its crags or something equally distressed.

When I turn I do it slowly. When I stoop for the ground, to pick up something I’ve dropped or that has fallen independently, I bend slowly and invariably groan as I do — volcano of worry, earthquake of fear? I don’t even know if they make a sound, but I hear them — yes, I do…

We dare not speak of my brain and its fogs that lift a little from time to time but then settle in again — gravy in a stew pot, or sauce as on pasta. What comes up disappears almost at once unless it is captured. No time except the present

Mostly, though?

I sit with all of this until I get up, do the next thing after a long time; it doesn’t end, does it…?

This is the inventory, the central ritual of my retired, disabled life. This is all there is to it, to me — simple, isn’t it?

Isn’t it?

A slow letting up on the past… slowing-down of past into present… punk song echoing beyond it…and we all, I know, you know the words. Don’t you?

Don’t you?

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onward,
T