Ada's #19

The Best Button

“If I ventured in the slipstream/Between the viaducts of your dream

Where immobile steel rims crack/And the ditch in the back roads stop

Could you find me? /Would you kiss-a my eyes?

To lay me down/In silence easy”  --Astral Weeks, Van Morrison

 

I’ve been listening to the album, Astral Weeks for weeks now,

so much so that a friend calls and says, It really is turning into

Astral Months. And Bob writes to say that he’s been listening to

the same album for five years so maybe, I’m just getting started.

The way you think this could either go on forever, or stop now,

or how you find a safe place to lay down and before you get really

comfortable, you’re already nostalgic for here, already miss where

you just came to be. I’m just getting started on wanting things

to go on—eating  past hunger, kissing past the point

of no return, swallowing the whole sky when you look up to

see the birds go by, thinking they’re angels, and here’re the clouds

again, and darkness past the point of regular behavioral glooms,

and it’s the spinning that’s so satisfying, though it’s no longer

on a record, it’s the way it asks nothing of me, or the way it

exists in another time, and it keeps giving me something, 

the way most live people can’t keep giving, because it’s exhausting 

and so hard to give all the time. And who am I to ask someone to 

fill my singular, impossible need? Give me a little more here. 

Wait, take it all back. It is the noise we’re making, that tree 

making noise, this voice making a noise in my jeans, up in this 

plane, where for three hours now, I’ve pushed repeat, repeat, repeat 

and it’s become my favorite button, my favorite pet of an item. 

So much so, that I’ll think I’ll use it more. At the end of the 

slipstream’s whoosh of breath, I’m going to push it, push my 

little button so the song comes on, this time louder,

this time, no one will lose their job, or have to go on broke and scared,

and this time, no one will get stuck on the other side of the world

dying and scared, and this time everyone will have button, a button

made out of blood cells that lives on tiny beats, a button that 

looks like a heart, and we can walk around and push each other’s 

buttons and these good buttons will be on the outside, and people 

can see if our button needs pushing, will know just when to touch 

us right here in the chest, to turn us on all over again.