Rain in Miami

So far 2020 has been pretty great to me. I was told astrologically I would be reconnecting with old friends and parts of myself this year, among other things. The year started out with one of my best friend’s marrying an amazing girl, which brought me together with old friends, which was amazing. It always amazes me how much time can pass and feel like nothing when you are placed in the same room as someone who is truly an old, dear friend. It’s like no time has passed and you feel this sense of yourself that maybe has been quiet for a while. There are a few cities that have the same effect on me. I believe it’s because the events that transpired in these places was extremely transformative in some way. When I was debating on where to take a few days away in-between leaving my new old friends at my old job and starting my new journey at my new job, I decided I wanted to go to Miami (southern Florida in general). I lived in Miami for a brief period of time in my early twenties and it was probably one of the happiest periods of my life. Southern Florida since then has been an escape numerous times for me when I really feel like I lost a sense of myself. I have a dear friend that lives in the area who always welcomes me with wonderful spa water. I love the heat. There’s something about southern heat and humidity that really resets me. It’s like I sweat out all these toxins and return to a healthier state of mind and a more balanced outlook in all areas. I eat healthier. I return to my love of exercising, and I just feel at peace. It also doesn’t hurt that when I’m there, I’m reminded that I am the same twenty-two year old who was capable of real happiness. Today I found a poem I wrote when I was down there when I was twenty-two. It actually is a prose poem because bits of it were a letter written to a friend at the time. Parts of that letter eventually made it into the poem. Reading it, it feels like I could have written it today, as the city (like the old friend it is) still brings out the same old feelings in me.

Rain In Miami

There is little a tulip could change today. Enclosed is a very moment of my life. Treat it delicate, as part of time, as an itsy-bitsy piece of a greater universe. It’s a splash of rain from a leaking roof. A drop by drop smack of gasp. A moment you want to put on when your arms are freckled with goose bumps. The sweater you would wear to a bookstore on a day you don’t have to study Buddha to learn how to meditate. Americans picture Paris this way…wine bottles on tables in rainy outdoor cafes. All day I feel like someone is listening to me, really listening. It’s the audacity only a poem could give- the idea that someone wants to hear your thoughts. The deer pause will always lead you to a startle. You will always run. Closer you’re getting to the cocoon your realtor sees you in when she sees you in this chrysalis state. Emily Dickinson’s tiny bedroom, where one window overlooks a thousand immortal poems. You find yourself on the flower petal, wet and liquefied. Filled with abundance at the idea of what you can hold. You become the sound of jazz, ink splattered on the fingers of ideas, the jism of genius unable to find its egg. You feel fertile, libidinous as a ripe peach in heat. A simple frame holding all the sensations of a spring farmer’s market. Today gives it to you, the blue moon ice cream cone in your childhood hand, the melons you checked for ripeness during your puberty hour, the air of suspense as you walked hand and hand throughout time. The simple wonderment of page marks and line breaks. It is all about how you do it. How you live your rainy days. You can lay in bed wanting tulips in sunlight or you can live it in warm sheets, hot tea, a good book of sad, bearable, breathlessness you haven’t felt since you lost time to the flushed skin of desire.