“Every part of you has a secret language. Your hands and your feet say what you’ve done.

And every need brings in what’s needed. Pain bears its cure like a child.”

– Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi –

What was it that Beau did the morning after this revelatory night-musing? The same thing he did every morning, just the same. He awoke just before dawn, splashed cold water on his face from the bucket under the window, ran three times up and down the creaking stairs of the empty building, careful to skip the four missing boards; then he lit a candle, opened his Rumi collection to whichever page revealed itself, and hung upside-down from the open beam of his bedroom doorway long enough to read the entire thing out loud. Without fail, whether his recitation was a single stanza or many pages, by the time the poem completed, Beau was thoroughly at one with his primordial essence. He relished in feeling it pulse heart to tail-tip as he swung himself down and let his feet find ground.

It was the same morning routine that had shaped his sun-greeting the entire summer, prior to moving back to the city for college, though now adapted for the relativity of civilization. Out there, it had been a cold, clear mountain stream instead of a gutter-fed window bucket, and it had been a cascade of mossy boulders rather than creaky stairs, and it had been a firm, abiding branch of a generous fir in place of the door frame reminiscent of someone’s abandoned demolition project. All the same, though: it did the job. Awake, alive, present.

Just as he had the morning before his acceptance into the military, as well as the day after, as well as this day, Beau followed said ritual awakening with a meditation, staring at the sun[1]. Sometimes he sat in silence, other times he rang a bell with a hammer and bellowed guttural chants in no recognizable language, and sometimes he jumped rope while singing rhymey kid songs. This part of the daily routine changed frequently, as Beau found that it helped him to acknowledge where they were all the same.

If anyone ever overheard this eccentric cacophony, they didn’t let on. But this is New York, so they would have. No one heard. Beau’s domicile was an abandoned building in the midst of larger, more accessible abandoned buildings, and not even the craftiest of the hobos who made their way through the pry-bar-friendly window-boards of the other buildings even came within glancing distance of Beau’s place. There were a number of perfectly logical reasons for this, but they, combined with all of the cracks in their logic, all contributed to an intricate Venn diagram that had Beau at the center. Flower-of-Life style.

Having come of age on the edge of the city, a quiet black kid obsessed with Kung Fu, Lao-Tze, Sufism, and Rumi, self-aware as a trans man since before those words were given to him, Beau had a long-developed mastery of shape-shifting, disappearing and reappearing, moving undetectably without flinch, and deflecting incoming tidals of neighboring systems as needed. At this point, he was so practiced with the skills of this multi-tool, he could use it day or night, on-site or off, steady backgrounded or snapped into focus. He didn’t snooze on the tool-sharpening either. Hence the daily cold-water splash. Enlivening. Embodying. Purposeful.

To Beau, it seemed ludicrous, properly absurd, that anyone immersed in an environment that reified the legitimacy of the nation-state on a minute-by-minute basis would have need of any morning routine less stark or strange. Surrounded by visceral theatre that produced a constant glut of consumer propaganda for the embodied ecosystem to process, most of which boiled down to bells and whistles of distraction politics and survival tactics, clanging in the name of the right to drown out the simple truth of what the ground under their feet knew, held, spoke, and sang incessantly, the human body required a devoted custodian and a trusted anchor. Beau could hardly remember a time when he did not choose to meet the dawn of a new day on his own, listening into that quiet before anyone else got a say in who, what, how, or why he should be. Even as a child, solemn and watchful, with a piercing kindness that most adults found necessary to downplay or shake off, Beau was drawn to that dark hour before dawn, mesmerized by its specific tone of penetrating voidness. And in the city, it was the only relative quiet that the day held. So Beau felt inclined to hold it in equal measure. And there he was always held, without fail.

By the time the orange light of dawn spread its fingers through its lover’s hair, Beau was fed and dressed, strapped in to his regular undercover monksuit, ready to hop on his bike for the hour-long zig-zag path to school that was easily worth the price of a stable squat, moot gym membership fees, and avoiding the frenetic hustle of the subway. The frenetic hustle of street traffic, however, Beau considered a treasured video game, whooping a wingbeat of Shaolin’s finest [2] as he soared between lanes and dipped down cobblestone alleys.

-**

1. To be clear, this pulse here. No shade on U2.
2. Faster than the eye can find.

Something shifted noiselessly through the shadows. Something became the shadows, then relinquished their forms when a pair of eyes latched on and signaled the nerves to reach out a shaky hand to scare the witness awake. Something went unnameable and unnoticed, puppeting its effects into chain-link fences and reaction formations. Something loomed up the size of billboards and scuttled along under car tires. Something filled the cracks in seamless veneers and snaked its way into the chinks of the armor. Something “Hey-Hey-Hey”ed the pop stations and paid-paid-paid the culture-war centurions. Something slinked along at the bathroom door of a drunken President, overwhelmed and weeping. Something fought in the online pit bull rings and spat hatred at the gay soldiers. Something cranked out the merchandise and trampled the competition. Something tazed the old ladies and swallowed the extra Perkoset.

There was indeed an Enemy at Large, but it was not the “diabiological plot” for which the news stations were already making up cutesie names. It was not the crazy weather patterns nor the thousands of pointing fingers. It was not the Leftist Extremists, and it was not the Anti-Choice Nutjobs. It was not the Carters nor the Clintons, not the Kardashians nor the Cosbys, not the Jester nor Anonymous.

It was a Shadow, the so-called monster of the vast dark inside which all villains and goblins were conceived.

It was a Shadow, a shape cast upon a surface, made by the dance of whatever exists between the Light and a Wall.

As with anything perceivable on the inner screens of consciousness: it was always an Inside Job.

Beau DuPont awakened from an undeniably wakeful sleep to write down these words:

“all is one, within which light & shadow play. there is shadow, and we are present with it. when it is not a dark that we are afraid to go into, it ceases to be a monster invented to threaten us from inside our closets and under our beds. it is simply the natural effect of sunlight, candlelight, fire, casting its warmth on the reflective side of whatever it touches; the other side is dark, and the shadow that lengthens from its body is a measure of the space it holds.” [1]

-**

1. In case it’s been a while, have a moment.

“God turns you from one feeling to another and teaches by means of opposites, so that you will have two wings to fly, not one.” – Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi –

What is this? Beau du Pont pulled a little strip of paper out of the crack in the bench, rescuing it from the splintered slab painted thick in a brown with which no chocolate nor coffee would ever be associated. He read the above poetry from the curled little parchment. The rain-warmed concrete smiled up into the bottoms of his feet. The sky sighed down. A row of pigeons lined the electrical wire, drying their wings in the emerging sunlight. With a deep breath of the well-hydrated air, Beau tucked the paper coil into his right shoe and walked into the recruiting office.

-**