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.
Showing posts with label February. Show all posts
Showing posts with label February. Show all posts
February 27, 2010
February 11, 2010
Epistles
Once the sleep kicked in I could’ve slept forever. The streets outside are white, same as the walk & the yard, despite the plow. The sun is out now but there is no place to go. All the trees have bunched branches in clusters hung low to the ground. The first snow started Friday in the afternoon & didn’t stop until late in the night the next day. I checked the streetlight, other side of my window & heavy curtain, about once an hour through the storm. Heavy storms like that sometimes you just look out. Arrested, wordless. It’s what you do.
The second snow started Tuesday & started with sleet drops and rain. I was walking back from Coffee Cat with someone we’d been writing some of the afternoon. The sky was grey in that ominous way the air has of making it seem bigger than the sky. A block from Hanson the first ice drop hit me & then the second, Did you feel that it’s starting I said too quickly & then felt silly bc it betrayed not really the panic but the extraordinary awe I secretly felt. I knew the next storm was going to be a big one. We were snaking our way along a foot path six inches wide in some sections & in some spots that ended in snow banks & put us back on to the street. He came in for dinner, we watched a movie then I sent him on his way bc my place is too small for a sleepover that might last more than one day.
It iced all night & I watched out my window as it changed to snow around 7am the next day. I was awed, but getting nervous, too. Ice on the lines is what brings them down I remember bc of 1999 & the power outages all over Anne Arundel, & three of my boys in the hospital after that, it was late night when I begged them not to drive home.
They called me witchy after the accident but had been doing that for years. It was just how my mom used to do, try to warn me off certain nights, then I’d end up in big trouble. I never listened to her & so it would piss me off like she’d jinxed or cursed me it took me years to get that it wasn’t a jinx just her gut feelings & so finally I started to listen to mine, too.
When the snow did start in the morning I’d been up for four hours already. I put a movie in & when that was over slept on the sofa most of the day. I was up from around 4 in the afternoon til midnight again but didn’t do anything except Facebook & sitcoms on TV. I feel deep asleep at midnight & woke this morning at 10 & could’ve kept going. Sleep felt so delicious to me then, so organic, like marrow to my bones. This elixir is what I’d been running from. I am still under the covers & soft sheets the sun is out some people are walking or shoveling. But this is the deep rest I knew I’ve needed & I hope my neighbors don’t mind that right now there is no place, none, that I want to go.
~~
What I'm listening to: Madeline
The second snow started Tuesday & started with sleet drops and rain. I was walking back from Coffee Cat with someone we’d been writing some of the afternoon. The sky was grey in that ominous way the air has of making it seem bigger than the sky. A block from Hanson the first ice drop hit me & then the second, Did you feel that it’s starting I said too quickly & then felt silly bc it betrayed not really the panic but the extraordinary awe I secretly felt. I knew the next storm was going to be a big one. We were snaking our way along a foot path six inches wide in some sections & in some spots that ended in snow banks & put us back on to the street. He came in for dinner, we watched a movie then I sent him on his way bc my place is too small for a sleepover that might last more than one day.
It iced all night & I watched out my window as it changed to snow around 7am the next day. I was awed, but getting nervous, too. Ice on the lines is what brings them down I remember bc of 1999 & the power outages all over Anne Arundel, & three of my boys in the hospital after that, it was late night when I begged them not to drive home.
They called me witchy after the accident but had been doing that for years. It was just how my mom used to do, try to warn me off certain nights, then I’d end up in big trouble. I never listened to her & so it would piss me off like she’d jinxed or cursed me it took me years to get that it wasn’t a jinx just her gut feelings & so finally I started to listen to mine, too.
When the snow did start in the morning I’d been up for four hours already. I put a movie in & when that was over slept on the sofa most of the day. I was up from around 4 in the afternoon til midnight again but didn’t do anything except Facebook & sitcoms on TV. I feel deep asleep at midnight & woke this morning at 10 & could’ve kept going. Sleep felt so delicious to me then, so organic, like marrow to my bones. This elixir is what I’d been running from. I am still under the covers & soft sheets the sun is out some people are walking or shoveling. But this is the deep rest I knew I’ve needed & I hope my neighbors don’t mind that right now there is no place, none, that I want to go.
~~
What I'm listening to: Madeline
February 17, 2009
A February State of Mind
Friends friends friends
Some thoughts on where we be right now.
First, a definition: by WE, I refer to the collective We. And by collective, I refer to those folks impacted by current western seasonal/societal associations--yes, those of us hearkened by a deeper winter sense.
I am noticing a trend as of late, let's call it a case of the February's. Everybody I know is rushing around, myself included! allstrungout and agro, with far too much to do and fumbling and bumbling all over the place trying to get it all done. The word frenetic comes to mind. And indeed the stuff-to-do seems to be in the genuine form of responsibilities, within those areas of our personal lives that call for attention no matter what.
I've been witnessing the people, the WE, friends of mine, peers, family, work folk and other varieties of associations, all increasingly more tired and harried, simply put: exhausted, stressed out. And believe me, I speak for myself here.
I will share thus:
In my mind, my heart, my spirit, the wild nebuli longings of myself, deep and nameless as they are in those creative unbound mists and surges of the me to come I can feel my new aspects awakening. They haunt me, delicious, in the night--peaked spikes of quiet gleaming there at me with their long lean teeth. But when I go to create I am flat, dull, exhausted by the call of the common things of this world. So I am finding day by day a growing but subtle creative tension, this dark yearning in me to rebirth pitted against the world and its mundane measures that daily I must fulfill: work, family, friends, duty duty duty. And so it is on our final leg in the dark: when we meet upon the Devil, when it comes right down to that point by which we have to call him by name. This is the tenderest of tender times friends, and those duties that drag us and drain from us right now are indeed meant to weather us, yes; but only so that we might own the strength we've grown through out this long winter in the dark. The duties demanding your attention, those which drag you down, this is the final fight--the outter-world You meant to take You, the inner-wild creative and authentic You, down in the dark. Don't let this dis-owning, this shallow sucker punch, be the end. It's kinda like being on the crest of a great crashing wave: ride it, enjoy the ridebut may you not fight it, so that when you end up clobbered with a face-full of sand you still have the sensibility to dig the stillness there found in the rest and retreat. Remember why you were riding in the first place, dont let that crash suck or stun the light right out of ya....
And so too is there a greater fight going on right now, make no doubt about it. Each one of us individuals, should we so choose, might step up to the battle with love in our hearts and seek to be the change. With each passing year the world and all its temporal callings steady tries to take from us those wild-longings, that bit of magic and mist left in the morning still in your hair. Each year "time" speeds up and the pace we are "expected" to keep greatens.
You see it, whirling in madness all around you. Heck, if you are anything like me you barely see it because you're spinning so fast yourself you can barely slow down! It's ok, spin spin spin. But may it not take you, closed-eyes, unconscious, down the spout.
The most courageous act you can do right now is to keep your inner still amid this affront. And it's an action you can take, you have to take, in private, see: give time to your inner-process, these last few important gasps of breath to labor forth your new self are the difference between the life of imagination and dreams versus settling for the frenetic standards of Mr. or Ms. Stressy McStrungTheHellOut that life all around you seems to demand. No, you are not crazy. Yes, the answers are still in the quiet within. But the challenge--to stake your claim, your right, to go in there right now after them--is the most important thing there is.
Look ya'll, we got midwifing right now to do.
DONT
GIVE
UP---
Some thoughts on where we be right now.
First, a definition: by WE, I refer to the collective We. And by collective, I refer to those folks impacted by current western seasonal/societal associations--yes, those of us hearkened by a deeper winter sense.
I am noticing a trend as of late, let's call it a case of the February's. Everybody I know is rushing around, myself included! allstrungout and agro, with far too much to do and fumbling and bumbling all over the place trying to get it all done. The word frenetic comes to mind. And indeed the stuff-to-do seems to be in the genuine form of responsibilities, within those areas of our personal lives that call for attention no matter what.
I've been witnessing the people, the WE, friends of mine, peers, family, work folk and other varieties of associations, all increasingly more tired and harried, simply put: exhausted, stressed out. And believe me, I speak for myself here.
I will share thus:
In my mind, my heart, my spirit, the wild nebuli longings of myself, deep and nameless as they are in those creative unbound mists and surges of the me to come I can feel my new aspects awakening. They haunt me, delicious, in the night--peaked spikes of quiet gleaming there at me with their long lean teeth. But when I go to create I am flat, dull, exhausted by the call of the common things of this world. So I am finding day by day a growing but subtle creative tension, this dark yearning in me to rebirth pitted against the world and its mundane measures that daily I must fulfill: work, family, friends, duty duty duty. And so it is on our final leg in the dark: when we meet upon the Devil, when it comes right down to that point by which we have to call him by name. This is the tenderest of tender times friends, and those duties that drag us and drain from us right now are indeed meant to weather us, yes; but only so that we might own the strength we've grown through out this long winter in the dark. The duties demanding your attention, those which drag you down, this is the final fight--the outter-world You meant to take You, the inner-wild creative and authentic You, down in the dark. Don't let this dis-owning, this shallow sucker punch, be the end. It's kinda like being on the crest of a great crashing wave: ride it, enjoy the ridebut may you not fight it, so that when you end up clobbered with a face-full of sand you still have the sensibility to dig the stillness there found in the rest and retreat. Remember why you were riding in the first place, dont let that crash suck or stun the light right out of ya....
And so too is there a greater fight going on right now, make no doubt about it. Each one of us individuals, should we so choose, might step up to the battle with love in our hearts and seek to be the change. With each passing year the world and all its temporal callings steady tries to take from us those wild-longings, that bit of magic and mist left in the morning still in your hair. Each year "time" speeds up and the pace we are "expected" to keep greatens.
You see it, whirling in madness all around you. Heck, if you are anything like me you barely see it because you're spinning so fast yourself you can barely slow down! It's ok, spin spin spin. But may it not take you, closed-eyes, unconscious, down the spout.
The most courageous act you can do right now is to keep your inner still amid this affront. And it's an action you can take, you have to take, in private, see: give time to your inner-process, these last few important gasps of breath to labor forth your new self are the difference between the life of imagination and dreams versus settling for the frenetic standards of Mr. or Ms. Stressy McStrungTheHellOut that life all around you seems to demand. No, you are not crazy. Yes, the answers are still in the quiet within. But the challenge--to stake your claim, your right, to go in there right now after them--is the most important thing there is.
Look ya'll, we got midwifing right now to do.
DONT
GIVE
UP---
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