What if you know the day you will die
and this date is something you clutched
and then spent your whole life forgetting
that day is coming,
You sit in honky tonk bars south of the border to forget,
walk up the Spanish steps, run marathons,
plant trees in a small towns and talk to them to forget,
your roots clinging more and more to this life,
to the people you love –
You turn away from death,
though she sits beside you in the bar,
each morning she watches you swallow vitamins.
At night when you are most alone
she asks you to unzip her dress,
and then slowly you remember all the moments
you were lost in skin and sweat and spit and hair,
sliding off the body of someone you love,
your head back, taking every sensation into one moment,
screaming, yes, yes, yes,
She comes to you, lights a cigarette,
your throat chakra open,
your legs wide open to the sky,
and you have already given yourself to her,
you are practiced at giving yourself to her
like the moment you brush aside the hair
from your daughter’s eyes
so she can tell you everything, because everything
is what death wants you to have before she takes you,
clinging to earth like a vine,
raining on her with hot tears of memory,
clutching even the painting with the girl in the boat
Let go, she says, they’ll all be okay without you, she says
let’s dance, she says,
the notes to the song so familiar you weep in joy.
Maybe she is not a servant, but the one who has been
with you all along, the days when you said I can’t get up,
and you did, the days when you said, I can’t do this again,
and she whispered so don’t do this again.
You never imagined God with blue fingernails
and shoes made for fucking,
You never thought she’d laugh at you
with stars spilling from her tongue.
You never thought she would have red lipstick on her teeth
and say I’ve been beside you all along.
You never thought she’d be so familiar
that when the day came,
the day you spent your whole life trying to forget,
you got in the car with her like it was any other day,
not even looking in the rear view mirror,
but ahead to this life,
to what has been waiting for you all along.
Writing Prompt – Topic: Rebirth, The Hero’s Journey
Take us to the moment when you felt the weight of the journey fall away, a tremendous release, as if you had arrived, finally to something new.
If you like more prompts for the Hero’s Journey, order STORYquest, the Writer, the Hero, the Journey – a twelve week workshop in a workbook.