There is a Contemplative Dance Practice
that involves just the eyes:
direct focus, eyes closed,
soft gaze, and peripheral vision, or even
looking at the spaces between things.
This is a way to dance, when
—forget getting out of bed—
bravery
is staying awake,
is the willingness to continue
to draw breath through the static of pain
or the crushing weight of
i don’t know what, something raging,
something not
functional
is a loose term, anyway.
Once I thought it was such a priority,
becoming a functioning adult, a contributing
mainstreamer.
I tried hunching my shoulders and cracking the whip,
sucking in my gut until I could
no longer draw breath–
all this to fit it’s dictate.
Then something broke;
and I began to celebrate my dysfunction, my
disassociation making excuses
for me,
I am not like them
stay separate, out of reach or
give up when it’s hard to say
what I mean
reducing myself to miscommunication
and imbalanced equations.
Now I realize more about what my functions really are.
I function each day
as a conduit, a conductor, a translator.
Or a mirror.
A balancing agent.
An answer.
I can be functional while catatonic
because I am a poetic scientist
observing —peripheral gaze—
my own unresponsiveness.
I listen to the voices fire command after command
after command
and answer with
a blink at the edge of capacity
because today this is my dance.
I function
as a lover,
using the special nuances I know you like, filling page after page,
or making love for hours,
seeing only that darkness of my eyelids and
the brilliant flashes of light.
I practice listening.
I am trying to learn to stand myself,
to hear the bias and the slander and the poison
and not use it
because
it might be my function to sing a song about you
and I must be still so I can hear all the notes
written in the spaces between silence.
I function as your muse,
a friend
looking directly at you, becoming that spark
igniting movement suddenly,
changing behavior in wild fits
or driving you delightfully mad.
I can be a functional fantasy,
inviting your gaze to slide over me I
do things for you that you might not do for yourself.
I remind you of things and
distract you from things.
I even let you close your eyes.
I couldn’t possibly compensate you
for all the time you have spent
being kind to me, for what you have taught me.
And I swear I will forget the tally marks as I learn
to relax into this economy
of caring for one another.
And what if it were also my job
my function
to be optimistic,
confident
that despite all of this appearance of brokenness
with its clamoring symptoms and crippling side effects
I can soften my gaze, knowing
I am complete?
What if we were to realize
we work,
and we each get to decide
how we fit together.