While you are dead, you will miss tending your garden; the dew on the early morning spider webs strung between the rosebushes, the dark smell of earth in your nose, the rough feel of dirt between your fingers, and even the ache in your knees. You will miss the little breezes freshening across your damp forehead, the pull against your hands of the weeds clinging to life, and the dog turds decorating your uncut lawn. While you are dead you will miss them, but all things come around again, perhaps even you.

I touch the smooth paper of the notebook, all blank and waiting for my words. There is nothing else that feels like paper on the fingertips, so smooth and fast, a racetrack for my pen. I touch the pen, gripping it between my finger and thumb and I feel its hard barrel unyielding, reliably delivering up my words. I touch the floor with my bare feet, oh how I hate to wear shoes, because then my feet touch scratchy wool or claustrophobic nylon or sweaty leather. I prefer to be able to wiggle my toes on the ground and feel my toes spread apart from each other, each one sending its little pad of smooth cool glassy tile up to the receptors in my brain. My whole body is one big toucher, if I try I can feel the separate red hairs of my sweater against my arms and the elastic tightness of my bra straps and the soft folds of my pants waving around my legs. I am alive and I am here because I can feel.

I don't know how to dance a measured dance, meeting the beat of tradition's music, and swinging to meet a partner's arms. I don't know the feel of his arm around my waist guiding me in the steps of the time-honored past. I don't know the sweet peace of families sewn into my dress or braided in my hair.

I don't know who my blood is. I don't know what my race is; my skin seems covered still by the soft cheesy membrane I was born with, moldy and crumbly like mealy little warts. Even my time seems distant, as if I am living behind smoked glass.

Seen from space, I am not even visible. I am microscopic dust, blowing away in the blink of an eye, and as much missed. We are, all of us, Halloween ghouls with clackety skeleton bones, dancing as all marionettes do, pulled by unseen strings tied to strings tied to strings tied and retied and retied. All is meaningless, and I am therefore free.

I don't know why my cat Mab makes so much noise. Surely by this time she knows I cannot understand her? Perhaps she just likes the sound she makes, halfway between a squeak and a scrowl. To me it's an annoying sound like fingernails down a blackboard or a baby crying in an airplane, from the seat directly behind you.

There she goes again, interrupting my writing; it's a squeal this time, reminding me of a teenager's whine, that meaningless voice of anger and disappointment with parents, wanting nothing so much as recognition of how pissed off they are.

Mab makes me scribble off-balance, but I'm going to try to write through it anyway, no matter how unbearably trivial it may seem.

To write poems you must have a yearning for home beyond home. All my life I have cried aloud, alone in the wilderness, "I want to go home." All my life I have followed the answering echoes and found — more wilderness.

Let me come in, let me come in. I am a bee living a bee’s life, buzzing against the windowpane, beeing in a loud sonorous boring drone. I have dived deep into the sticky sweet heart of the petunia, banded pink tapering into a pool of nectar. I sucked in petunia syrup and bloated with petunia gas. Nectar coats my inside and my outside, sticking to my heart and my wings. I am honey in the making; let me come in.

No one wants me to come in, because people are afraid of me. How silly. People are huge and lumpy and can squash me with a folded newspaper with no mercy for my  bee heart and bee brain buzzing together in rhythm. People are bee deaf. I have a little stinger, some protection ha ha. It’s not much use against a folded newspaper. All the advantages are on their side, and yet they see me on their windowsill and scream “a bee a bee!” They send me to premature and violent death just because my beeness offends them.

Let me come in, let me come in. I am a bee who wishes to come in and rest in the warm kitchen, panting my wings. I want to bee into the kitchen and eat the sweet rotting fruit left on the counter. I want to bee into the heart of the dying flowers vased on the table. I want to bee against the windowpane, and die peacefully against the glass. Let me come in and bee with you.

Let me come in. I am just a poor bee with a pretty begging song.

The other day I was thinking about my childhood. (The older I get the more I enjoy this.) I was a hider.  I liked to be by myself, thinking my own private thoughts and dreaming my own private dreams. Inside my head I was not hampered by the outward reality of a gawky too-tall girl who thought she was smarter than most of the other kids but not smart enough to keep this to herself.

I had many hiding places. One of my favorites was a large grey rock that was hidden from the house and prying adult eyes by the blackberry vines in the back yard. I made a tunnel through the vines, a secret thorny tunnel impassable by adults, which led to the back of the rock.  The rock stood higher than my head and the back was wide and smooth and more massive than my father. It had a large shelf halfway up just long and wide enough for me to lie full length upon. Here I was completely hidden by blackberry vines, surrounded by thrumming bees, protected by thorns.
 
I pressed my stomach down on the cool surface, and flung my arms above my head. I spread my fingers and pushed my hands down, flat and hard, to feel the tickling of tiny grit on my palms. I pushed my nose down, I squashed it flat, and sniffed deep of that dusty, rocky smell. The blackberry vines gently brushed the backs of my bare sunburnt legs. 

I was hidden, safe. I was silent. I laid my ear against the face of the rock shelf, sealing out all outside noise. I listened to the rock's voice. It sang like the hollow boom of a large drum beat very softly. It hissed and burbled as it breathed. I was soothed to find a rhythm so like mine.

I forget where I’m going sometimes because I’ve been in such a hurry all my life I’ve never  been able to arrive anywhere. I forget the real meaning of life because it has rushed by in a blur – oh horsefeathers, the meaning isn’t rushing by, I am.  If I wasn’t rushing, would I know the meaning of life?  I remember writing on the beach and while my fingers were busy rushing, my eyes saw a seagull flying high above with a clam in its mouth. The  seagull dropped the clam on the rocks below, squawking its shrill triumph to the crows, who were playing in the shallows, ruffling water through their feathers and dancing in the cold winter air. I forget where I was going with this, but I think I saw a piece of meaning – death for the clam, victory for the gull, exhilaration for the crows. If I hadn’t slowed down to watch those birds (and let’s not forget the clam), their world of meaning would have passed me by too, never to be remembered.

Here's a strangle little piece I wrote as a warm up exercise using the phrase "I stand" as my first two words. Who knows where these things come from? I have no idea what to do with this; I hope it will fulfill the function of compost and somehow, somewhere, fertilize something.

I stand on a cliff overlooking the sea, foaming green around hidden rocks. My feet are bare and I feel the prickly summer grass, dry and yellow, tickling my toes. Nevertheless I am not safe. I feel the presence of a dark dark bogeyman creeping up behind me to push me off the cliff. He is wearing a black ski mask and has an icepick in place of a heart. He is like a crazed but effective CIA man, and his goal is to rid the world of me, even though he doesn't know, or care, why. He will laugh when he sends me tumbling into the green abyss below, and he hopes that the sharks that frequent this coastline will eat my flesh and even crush my bones into dust.

Well, I'll show him because he doesn't know that I am Gumby Woman. I have elastic limbs and prehensile sticky toes, and when he at last reaches me and shoves — thwack his fist into my back — I fall, yes, but my toes anchor to the cliff and my legs stretch, stretch, stretch, Gumby Woman at her rubbery best. I stretch all the way down to the rocky beach below and pick up a jagged rock, and I spring — boing! — back to the cliff top and the CIA bogeyman, who has taken off his ski mask, and has his mouth hanging wide open in shock. I smash the rock right into his gaping mouth and knock out all his teeth. Hah! the CIA is no match for Gumby Woman.