Mishy: An introduction to a term.

0a. “For billions of years since the outset of time every single one of your ancestors has survived. Every single person on your mum and dad’s side successfully looked after and passed on to you life.” – Mike Skinner

0b. A simple yet vibrant evolution of mushy.

1. To be tender and open to the soft carousel of the world. To be present and affected by beauties ranging from simple to extreme:

• Beauties of simplicity: Leaves, well-positioned picture frames, inescapable melodies, caution, coincidence, efficient packaging, toothpicks.

• Beauties of extremity: On-time public transportation, sincerity, unity of age, city planning, trees, oxygen, discovery, unspoken connections, flight.

2. To create and respect Edge around the Softs.

Mishyness is sturdy and skeletal; a framework of bravery and forwardness that charges ahead in tandem with the open-yet-well-cared-for-wounds of the Soft.

3. An exhibition of quiet Mishyness that bubbles in the heart:

You are walking through a quiet neighborhood simultaneously balancing day-to-day anxieties with an optimistic hopefulness and excitement for the unknown and the foundations created, without your existence, in the past. You have a minimal interest in jazz and a less-than-polished brass band rehearses inside your downy chest where it is always after-hours and slightly sweaty. The skin on the bottom of your feet buzzes and hums; glad that you are alive and using the tools handed to you from a nebulous, intangible progenitor. The trumpets pump your blood and you still look both ways before crossing the street. You are electric and delicate, always.

4. An Extreme Yearning To Find Others Who Are Mishy.

An intense desire to bottle the light in someone’s eyes when they recognize Mishyness in another. The light intensified by the scenario in which you discover another’s Mishy flashlight in midnight wooded areas: a work conference in Des Moines, in line for the bank, your cousin’s college graduation party, the mall, civil services.

5. You are a rubber band. You are Mishy and alive.

The Father’s Fist

Location: Beneath your steaky chest plate, through the damp foyer of your lungs, down the leaning hall of stalagmite book stacks, there is a hovel with splintered walls and a sinking floor covered in sawdust. Within this cramped, creaking, and moist hovel: a balled fist—it is the fist of your father, his tempered, leather hand, his mathematical digits, his river wrist trunk-like ripping through the floorboards now anchored and permanent, the circumference of his fist rounding the room, silent and still with a firm and steady pulse.

Mechanics: When the fist is flexed, digging the beveled edges of his fingernails into his palm, the hilled and gnarled knuckles rise like a breath and push into the cavity’s ceiling, unwelcome, unsupported. An uncomfortable pressure reverberates throughout the body. Its earthquake pulse, its sonaric wave, ripples the surface of the lung tissue and shortens the breath. The fist’s reach, the Phantom Fist, takes flight and docks inside the throat. Invisible fishing line, wrapped around the metacarpal bones and the phalanges, tied to brass fasteners affixed to the dorsal side of the eye are pulled slowly, shifting the sphere like a ball-valve, releasing hot fluid in the gaps of the ocular cavity.

Triggers: Artifacts such as photographs, stolen sunglasses, handkerchiefs, or winter gloves.  Hygienic scents. Disappointment buzzing in the static of silent phone calls. Recognition of woodgrain patterns from bedroom furnishings. Thinking of him at your current age. Remembering insulting upholstery patterns from the late ‘80s or early ‘90s existing in cheaply carpeted and soft-blue vacuums of memory.  Unanswered cellular vibrations and neon emissions. The ever-growing chasm between shared likenesses and vast differences.  An urge to impress him in artistic endeavors, professional successes, tie-tying, gas tank filling, egg making, and sidewalk striding. The severance of familial fibers. Imagining his death (an unwanted daymare that occurs multiple times a week).  The horrid and beautiful feeling that the differences bred into you could only be created by his uniqueness, his rearing (leather) hands, and no one else. Politics and classism. Car exhaust over fresh cut grass. Denim shorts and white tennis shoes. Hair metal.

Twinted Perception

0a. Simultaneous interpretation of an event creating separate signifiers of importance (misplaced meaning).

0b. “Parallel Or Together?” by Ted Leo & The Pharmacists [parallel, not together]

Poetic Example:

“One Morning, One Weekend, In The City”

1.

This morning I passed a ghost on the street.
She was making soft patterns along the longitude
of different melons and humming sweetly the sounds
of winter and wishes. In the histories of this city
are tales of a romance that ran so wildly it appeared
only in overexposed photographs and the morning
winces of regret stared back from porcelain.
But passing her briefly, tied to the neck in cashmere,
lit the pins of falling cards and made wide the holes
we leave behind. Her dog and her new friends
and the promotion- oh, you got rid of the Subaru?
They all float like ashes in tune with the horn section
that pulls to red lights. A sincere parting and the crush
of erased, well, everything, where she once and will never
exist again and she just might have, maybe, winked.
I cross the street in 9 seconds and push my coat into
my chest and wince one more time, running
glassy eyed to my computer to write this down.

2.

I woke at 9 this morning and wiped from my face
the stains of sleeping before washing and weeping
post-evening. Crept in the crisp cold of my flat and
turned silently the knobs of my stove-top, something
about not wanting to disturb a blue-sun kitchen.
The neighbor’s cat climbed the fire escape with his
secrets and I remembered that time, as a child, my mother
wouldn’t let me have the peach dress, something about
ruining the color scheme or more specifically her own scheme
you must know the one, just like the others, the one
that never was and only hushed and huffed and
hopped along couches (Iron deficiencies and deep
depression), but, what I meant to get at, was I felt like
a little girl and I criss-crossed the latitude of my flat
on tip-toe because I could. The bare counters whispered
to me of a certain absence so I hurried downstairs
and two blocks west to the farmer’s market and after
much global deliberation picked the most sincere
cantaloupe I could find, passing people I once knew,
faces I once held delicately, now prancing too just as I
through the gold-yellow morning of a new day.