Time Traveling Memoir Bouquet

The change of the seasons today has me all backwards and forwards and inside out. Part frisky bunny, singing daffodil, hopping robin, crying baby hawk in a nest, and purring mother lioness. I'm not quite sure what decade it is, but I am using solid colors, so this must be modern art and I am painting with paw prints and talons from the taxidermist laboratory of my inner sanctuary.

There are the familiar earmarks of eras that better suited my sensibilities: kaleidoscopes, unicycles, monocles, cigar boxes filled with wax, and brass stamps, rings with family crests. My porcelain cameo doesn't come in any color but pink. The Indian men in the woods want their stories to be told, and everywhere someone is digging up a fortune in sentimental value. It's so beautiful, and more than I can take in the confines of my whale bone bodice. Heavy gasping only brings me further to ecstasy. There's an apothecary study with human teeth, and Latin names I don't recognize, and there are 101 recipes for dyspepsia.

Tinctures and liniments in brown glass shine and jump into your hands on an as needed basis. Medicine is the life of the party, because this is the 1880s, and electricity is sparse. Everything is more alive in the dark. Smelling salts are just out of reach, but it's clear I have drama written all over the hat perched on my head. Lady doctors aren't supposed to wear veils, even slight veils. It's too cloying and high tea is impractical these days and served too late in the day.

I have vertigo because the galactic heart is just so vast these days and sometimes the ball of neuroses that gets passed from court to court feels like a medicine ball. I will not fall to my seaside death, again, because my angina will keep me from running with my eyes closed like a fool, and this time around I remember where I kept my key and which desk drawer it goes to in which house. This time name calling and labels won't fool me. I know all about the pharaohs and all about the hell hounds and that kaleidoscope is just to f-ing fly...not to meditate with it like I'm at a Buddhist train station on a cosmic highway, mesmerized by a giant hour glass, watching the sands of time.

I've traded quills for printing presses, which is quite a relief, because I bite my feathers and my mouth turns black with ink. Somewhere in this dream, the Lullaby of Birdland plays. I am here for containment, doctoring, documentation and like a guardian angel I aim to remind people who they are. Now, proceed. Carry on. Just do your thing. You're awesome.

Poetry carries me on wings of a dove and for a moment I want to be pregnant yesterday. I want our old friends with the long beards in the dusty studies to feel at home among the living, which is a gift I only need give myself amid my nineteenth century delirious daybeds, leather armchairs and bubbling beakers, as our friends quietly chuckle and loudly shuffle an invisible deck of cards. Who writes poetry anymore, anyway?