how to breathe

that moment you’re brushing your teeth and rubbing the dreams of hoary slumber from your eyes and you realize that there’s a poem somewhere that you can’t quite remember or that perfect line out of a bit of prose that sits like a drop of sweat on the tip of your tongue or that little bit of brilliance from Neruda or Foucalt that sums up everything you’ve ever felt in your entire life and what you’re feeling right now this very second as you watch yourself in your bathroom mirror slowly morphing into the person that everyone expects you to be—that everyone absolutely completely depends on you to be—this morning but you wish you could just crawl back into bed and find that poem or prose or bit of brilliance because you know that back between the bed-sheets is the only place that you can find the pieces of the soul you leave behind, the words that are the DNA to your life’s rhetoric, the brokenness you have to shed in order to face the harsh morning sunlight and the inevitable brutality it leaves inside your quaking heart