This is October, After Twelve Steps

Legs feel like walking sticks with those exposed, knobby joints. Nights fall swiftly without much warning. Lists grow longer and more obtuse as I grow languid in the listing process of writing one line down, then another, and another... Nine is the morning's desired hour to stir me from darkened, cavernous dreams. I read somewhere that people don't look forward to dreaming anymore. Dreaming is all I look forward to. Well, not really. There are others, too.

Like.

Letter writing.

I was struck last night as I lay in bed, gazing absentmindedly across the open room which lies past the foot of my bed {a queendom, kingdom without a king, as I also recently read}, my eyes lighted upon the letter, folded into three rectangular portions, two kinds of stationary, one plastered atop the other, pale pink under the other's eggy watercolor. Pen just dry, papers yet to be stuffed into envelope, address yet to be scrawled, I realized I had forgotten these words had not reached the eyes meant to read them. I sat there, doggedly, assuming she who would had already... read and received. Ha! So much for unconscious conditioning at the gaping, grasping, invisible tendrils of technology. And the finite action of handwriting, delivering a psychological push to those words, stronger yet less definite than the mail carrier's easy abandonment when releasing said letter from the grasp of red-cold fingertips in a few fine October days.

Like.

Filling Burners.

Stirring the contents of multiple frying pans and brews, letting one sizzle and another simmer, going for a walk and coming home to the smell of each single endeavor, noticing their points of intersection, letting the steam cloud together... In short, many new ideas on the horizon, soon to be making the shift to physical form.

Like.

Peering into Corners and Retrieving

ways to fill the front of an envelope, so that the letters fall across the page in a sweeping fashion, like ribbons fall accidentally out of the hair or slip noiselessly off the waist, settling in greeting on the ground used by the lively and the adventurous for day-long endeavors unhurried by the grinning approach of night.

neither snow... via oh joy.