She said she'd worry. She told me how wrung out her hands would be, white wrinkled skin simply slick with concern, cold and clammy. She told me how she would lay awake in bed, wondering whether her son would come home, if he was alive at all-- I left anyways.
The city is a cold place. I didn't notice when I first moved, with my cardboard box cramping my fingers, my head ducked and smirk stuck. But the cold creeps through all the little cracks in my skin: the lines of my palms, the creases in my elbows, the wrinkles on my wrists, the bend behind my knees-- I felt it after about three months, when I was sleeping outside, shivering through my clothes and all the memories of a worried mother, her tired hands, her shadow lined eyes. Watching my own hands, I saw how much more tired they were than hers, how much more tired they'd become in the past month than they had in twenty-four years. I watched them peel and crack away into an older man's hands, grime and corroded skin, like I'd been rotting in the alleyways, in the small warmth I could find next to a gutter, in the quiet memories and soft tears that made me only colder--
I started writing.
It was mumbles, crumbles of words into a flow that I spoke to brick walls and dumpsters. I soaked my skin into syllables and broke open into large calls to passerbys, wide eyes and curiosity and fear from the scraggly beard and chapped hands, a wind-screamed face, a bundle of rags hanging from my waist. I rattled off rhythm and carried myself to a place of peace and literature and I ate my words and slept inside my rhymes, and I tried to keep warm, tired hands tied to my chest like an anchor. I carried corded celtic knots of letters to strangers and they fell away from me like I was diseased, like literature from my lips was leprosy, a 12 point spoken font that carried past starving gums and broken teeth, like my innards were less than human, and I pleaded with them: let me teach you the ways of the streets, the beats of a businessman's shoes who forgets that I have a mother at home, worrying if I am alive, who hears my mumble crumble words and scurries to his car.
Let me teach you how to live off the taste of a word, how to keep warm in the sound of your own voice, cracked and broken as it may have become. And let me teach you, quiet as you may be, a leper of literature and loneliness, that there is a way to find yourself in memories of a better time, hands of a younger man, of a mother who knows that you live. It is not in the beat of a businessman's shoes, or the quite click snack of a woman's heels; it is not in the siren of a child's wail, or the hiss hush of a mother's shush. It is in the beat of a chest drumming against bone, in the beat of breath drawn between words like these, in the pulse of a hand that is rich enough to write on paper. It is in the wealth and the poverty and the brokenness that people are. It is how they find themselves speaking into mumbles and crumbles, tones that turn helplessness and hunger into a home, a place for resting weariness and an anchor: tired hands tied to a breastbone. It is in the fire of a lung tired from talking, who doesn't know how to do anything else.
