When you get to this age, it’s all about bones. They begin to thin like hair, or they grate against each other and the sound is large in your head but only a crinkling someone can hear if he puts his ear to your knee on the stairs — merely a crinkling, but he cringes and clenches his teeth. Bones go bad like bananas, lose their arc and soften, go limp. They go from staves to Easter eggs. They breathe and hold in air. Or they spurt out spurs, angry jabs at nerves along their roots, or even spit at the royal cord that rules the spine — or thicken around it in stenosis, tapping that long fibrous party line for neurochemical murmurings and screams….
I lie in bed in the mornings and as I swim to the surface of my mind from such deep dreams, I slightly, centimetricallly, tilt my pelvis in at the lower spine — until it clicks, two vertebrae engaging each other with no soft shield between, definitive but shy, and I cry. It hurts, and I know what that click means, but, still, it’s delicate and slight, pure like a sexual yearn so I tilt it back till it clicks again and keep clicking because you don't often hear your bones, do you?
All the cushions of bone, round or fluid, smoothed at the socket or elastic — they are drying, slipping, destroying themselves. Which leaves friction. Bone on bone. They’re following my headlong childhood, my strength that urged a baby into the light, some of the people I loved, into the past -- vanishing like a syllable on a breeze. Cartilege is in the process of leaving my bones to themselves. And my bones discover what they truly are is lace, jagged lace.
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