BURNT UP

The first thing that happened is I chose to let my house start to go.

By that I mean my apartment, of course. But it's the first time since I moved in and got unpacked that I stopped picking up after myself at least every third day. And I watched in a madness that was rimmed mostly by delight as the order around here, bit by bit, started to whittle away.

I knew all along. This is a need to have some control: when it gets real bad, when it's real bad I'll know and then I will open the windows and go gangbusters in here and get to clean up and feel like I have some sort of power over this place.

I have poems accumulating again, lots of them and I have started to want to post them, but I wont. Bc there are some things I get about myself now, about my voice, about how I write. And to post them would mean to change the formats, and the formats are good because they are intimate to me. My artistry. I am 33 woah no I'm not but I almost am--I am soon 33 and have been writing poems in spiral backed books since I was 14. I am 33 soon and I know me now, know my voice really for the first time and I've never before now felt good about that. I have been writing as my first religion since the choice I made on the steel-posted squeaky twin bed I fell in love with Brandon with at Libby's old pad on Wash Ave: This is it. This, writing, this is what--no matter what else--I will do. "This" to quote my fave line from a poem back then, This, all I ever had to fall back on. So I am for the first time in my life secure enough now, secure in my style choices--affect on the rhythm and cadence of things--in voice choices for reasons I only just recently fully got are political to me, in content and theme that arent choices but that compel and create and are simply born of me much as I turn to and motivate them.

And so it is February again, that bone-haired last week of February that always singes me to deadened discretion on the inside. I am an assault pariah when it comes to that silly toss of the head term Winter Blues. Blues aint the half of it. But I keep going I keep going I keep going the words take me there and write me all the way through. And I refuse to substantiate the society claims, the impartial explanations: it's just chemical, merely the result of lac of light. Of course! But we dont get what we mean when we say that because most of us dont get IT'S ALL LIGHT. IT'S ALL, AT OUR ESSENCE, ABOUT LIGHT. This is soul stuff we're talking about. This is the twinkling nebulous of mythos that glistens on the inner wall of tramps and blue bloods alike. What are your darkest secrets, those rat-teeth gnaws that have you crawling the walls of you in there, especially when the Great Everything with preened deliverance is making us all East Coasters--where the deep blood of societal injury cellularly and in the very earth remains--sit still from snow again and again? Think not of dead-ends but reasons--those are the motivators: The Divine Hungers. The ashes that linger are deceptive, we forget they are reason and once were bone tissue and scars and are meant to feed the later-coming new life of things.

Take medicine or get drunk or stoned or mean fucked-up, or, the best, lie to your self lots and all you want. I'm booted at this now--a soldier who knows the cadence of the diligent rhythm ellipses of her own soul. So I know the truth of me this time for sure: I am burnt out. Going over the same exact chart of this same exact time last year--when my ailments manifested truly in dis-ease. I literally remember standing in the back office at a family support center this very time last year, way out in the country looking at all the bureaucratic broke ass stuff I was required to do, feeling so hopeless and powerless, Haitian refugees literally crowding the door in the shy way they do when they dont speak the language and also dont know you yet. And being on the phone with someone else from work and her laughing about all the excess: the numbers of numbers of students out in the sticks we are responsible for/to. And I felt that same thing break, and it happened, the same thing but not nearly as deep a break or elemental, again this very week. My job is one fit for a liar contented on kicking the ashes. So much of society stays content on this, on the look-down at your feet neck-stuck cramped stare. There are eyes I suppose that must stay most-way closed because to open them up, and I know this, takes a lot of willingness and mostly can be an awful, awful lot of pain and grief. Dealing with reality, at first, often is...

But my eyes are opened, and have been.

My voice, carrying crying laughing learning loving seiging destroying but all the while leading me through, and fighting for my own ability to trust in it all along, is the reason why.