Tanning Toddler

"But somehow I know that only when it's dark enough can you see the stars"

MLK’s God and my spirituality and the three children corded to the sacks of vegetables and dirt on the over-sized and worn wheelbarrow coated in the calluses of the homeless and the flashes from cameras of empathetic visitors to the street who when passing by will sob desert sobs while quenching themselves at the oasis.

I gave them all the empties from our last party, but the trail of wretched warm beer traces their sojourn of sustaining love and suffering, past Patio Bonito, through the wind and night the forces them under the bridge and behind plywood and rusted metallic scraps until the equatorial sun smokes them out onto pavement and to work in dumpsters. Interminable clawing for monetized glass and crusted drool.

And this will go on for the entirety of the safely fastened toddler’s childhood until he decides or recognizes what has been handed to him at the get-go of our no-limit tournament. And if he nods in assent he will follow porous shadows that to us seem transparently bankrupt but to him promise change, freedom, opportunity. Armed and violent shadows, shadows addicted to self-implosion and degradation of spirit, twisted shadows, shadows unknown to the giant Bao of the African plain and scolded by the Red Wood, plagues incapable of providing respite in midday and burning in envy and the knowledge of deprivation after sundown.

But he has a choice, an option in the form of a moment or simple illuminated thought, a passing notion of appreciation for the afternoon breeze. Will he harness the light he perceives? It is beyond doubt that he is both capable and extremely unlikely to do so. Because the scalding shadow smiles with the horrible confidence of the house dictating the odds. Because the light is so foreign that he pours sweat under its clarity. Because he looks at his life and shudders at the climb that awaits him; from damp invisibility of the underground to the level of human connection through knowledge of the infinite. A vague and intimidating path.

And so the light passes over the young man’s rough fingertips to reveal the crevasses on his palms and the electric blue of angry veins throbbing in his forearms and biceps. Gradually he investigates his sore shoulders and screams at the wheelbarrow that his father found and that he was corded to, for its weight. And he breathes as he watches his chest expand and not contract. His stomach is muscular and his abdomen through his ribcage gaze almost coquettishly up at his face, tempting him to satisfy them with ravenous addition. And his quadriceps feel sturdy even as he sees his gray, destroyed Nikes and pushes the familiar pain running up from the arches of his feet through his chiseled calves and his hamstrings back into the cursed pavement.

And when its gone, its not to reappear. He has taken a step into a world that has begun to spin around him, where he is the center of something untouchable. His soul is brilliant yellows and greens. His mind is turning over itself not with joy but with the stepping stones to his own form of bliss. His ears take in what couldn’t be heard, and even the voices of his dying father who’s been dead and of his brothers who pull together in disillusionment equal to his vision are unrecognizable, like the foreign mumblings of ex-deities.

He loves them but can’t carry them. They must cherish their own light enough to allow it to glide them through the broken cobblestones, the asphalt, the clay, the dense matter of their prior existence. Each one of us glows but only some of us clean the windows.