The fifth month of the calendar year
arrives zipping on the back of one's neck like a gentle breath of hope, with
the clovery taste of mint-juleps mingled with the rainbow sight of roses
lassoed around the necks of oblivious thoroughbreds. It arrives with the lobed
sight of limp-eared hostas and greek-sounding perennials for sale in the
doorway of local retailers. It arrives with the spiked lavender shock of
hyacinths inching like troops as if saluting the heralding arrival of tepid
temperatures leading up to my front porch. May arrives with track meets and
with baseball standings. With overtly caffeinated college students living in
the university library for days on end teeming with nerve-clattering anxiety.
With hormonally-addled high school lads delicately unearthing the frosty
plastic cube of a corsage as if it were some kind of big mac made out of their
grandmothers’ wedding china, manacling it sport-watch fashion around the tube
of her wrist while lost in the frizz of her hair and the scent of her body and
the wild conjecture of what has the possibility of transpiring later that night
as he brandishes his elbow in front of her eyelashes like a boomerang for her
to grope, escorting his date out the front door of her parents’ house after
posing in front of the customary fusillade of camera snaps, the perfect spring
evening, his senses lost in the pulsating almost floral scent of the creature
waltzing next to him who somehow smells brand new.
Who smells like spring.
May arrives with the sight of a single pink helix-ribbon pinned to the blouse of survivors, cantering as if treading water around midtown in a billowing glob of awareness and of, intrinsically, hope.
May is the month of transitions--of solemn almost pastoral garb and geometric hats bearing limp tassels bobbing as if in lost unison at the rhetoric and ramble of a commencement speech. It arrives with playoffs and barbecues. With seasonal hoppy pilsners on draft. With time off requests and looming summer itineraries. With dreams of packing everything that aches with longing inside your chest in a carry-on bag and leaving and then coming back somehow changed.
May is the month where every kitchen I walk into seems to noticeably reek of windex. The month of people wearing shorts who blatantly just shouldn’t go there. The month of twenty dollar bills unassumingly slipped into graduation cards by relatives you hardly know. The month where the morning sun begins to ricochet off the planet in a canopy of pre-dawn tint around six a.m., and set even later, casting out a neon-pink sail bejeweled with a rusty patina, dappled with slight splotches of copper and blue into the horizontal balcony of the overhead west.
And dangling in the background like wished for white noise the intermittent nasal buzz of a stuttering lawn mower followed almost always in tandem by middle-aged curses.
Perhaps it is all just a lazy-hammock filled dream.Who smells like spring.
May arrives with the sight of a single pink helix-ribbon pinned to the blouse of survivors, cantering as if treading water around midtown in a billowing glob of awareness and of, intrinsically, hope.
May is the month of transitions--of solemn almost pastoral garb and geometric hats bearing limp tassels bobbing as if in lost unison at the rhetoric and ramble of a commencement speech. It arrives with playoffs and barbecues. With seasonal hoppy pilsners on draft. With time off requests and looming summer itineraries. With dreams of packing everything that aches with longing inside your chest in a carry-on bag and leaving and then coming back somehow changed.
May is the month where every kitchen I walk into seems to noticeably reek of windex. The month of people wearing shorts who blatantly just shouldn’t go there. The month of twenty dollar bills unassumingly slipped into graduation cards by relatives you hardly know. The month where the morning sun begins to ricochet off the planet in a canopy of pre-dawn tint around six a.m., and set even later, casting out a neon-pink sail bejeweled with a rusty patina, dappled with slight splotches of copper and blue into the horizontal balcony of the overhead west.
And dangling in the background like wished for white noise the intermittent nasal buzz of a stuttering lawn mower followed almost always in tandem by middle-aged curses.
Or perhaps it is the month of May.
***
Status: Entering 80 hours. Longest alcoholic
abeyance since the first week of March, circa sixty calendar squares ago.
Shit.
Physiology: My liver feels like a molested beehive
that a college male was coerced into sodomizing for some arcane fraternity
hazing ritual. At times it feels like my lower right side is almost sneezing.
Most of the time I feel fine. At fifty
hours in my heart resembled a piñata full of whirring sex toys at Mexican bachelorette
party. At about three days exactly it slowed down which is weird considering I’ve
pretty much been turned into Cronus when it comes to devouring all things
caffeine-related in heavily ground mytho-poetic slurps. My palms, thighs,
forearms and bottom of feet continue to itch. Lots of tingling around various
vectors of my body, as if my entire anatomy were Parker-brothers pinned to a board
game of OPERATION being played by tweezer-brandishing orangutans taking a furlough
from randomly typing out Hamlet, apishly gaggling every time my nose turns red.
Also (and this is interesting) for about two hours last night my jowls swelled
to the size of tulip bulbs and ached incessantly until I took an IBUPROFON and
massaged my facial flanges with the tips of my still-tittering immobilized alcoholic
fingers. I have no clue what might have
spawned this impediment of my viscera but it feels just like when you spend 24
hours madly making out with someone you love dearly and how afterwards all the
muscles in your face are just contorted and sore for days on end and you think
about how her mouth just attacked your ears and your cheekbones and your lips
every time you smile.
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