Not Poetry Thursday, somebody besides me needs this today, I'm sure of it

 There is a force that breaks the body
 ~Diane Seuss

There is a force that breaks the body, inevitable,
the by-product is pain, unexceptional as a rain
gauge, which has become arcane, rhyme, likewise,
unless it’s assonant or internal injury, gloom, joy,
which is also a dish soap, but not the one that rids
seabirds of oil from wrecked tankers, that’s Dawn,
which should change its name to Dusk, irony being
the flip side of sentimentality here in the Iron Age,
ironing out the kinks in despair, turning it to hairdo
from hair, to do, vexing infinitive, much better to be
pain’s host, body of Christ as opposed to the Holy
Ghost, when I have been suffering at times I could
step away from it by embracing it, a blues thing,
a John Donne thing, divest by wrestling, then sing.

Copyright © 2017 Diane Seuss. Used with permission of the author.

work

I have been doing some personal work over here.

It doesn't feel like I am getting anywhere on this work.

It's not to do list kind of work, well, maybe it is.

It is hard.

Exhausting.

Overwhelming.

It is work.

Most days I only have the strength left to pull myself into bed... even though what I really need to do is debrief.

I don't want to talk, so there is no relief there.

Writing would be a good outlet, but it makes the work even more real and thus scarier and more overwhelming.

I keep hoping that I will turn a corner on the work and it will feel lighter, more purposeful or even just done. I'd take partially done.

Instead, it feels like the pushing up the boulder and having it come crashing back on me.

Only it is larger every time it rolls back over me, flattening me.

I don't even have the emotional or physical energy to wander out in search of beauty.

I am just tired.

And tired of being tired.

And sad.

And tired of being sad.

Not Poetry Thursday, Mary Oliver's Wild Geese - because we all need this reminder

Wild Geese
~Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

I have been moved to tears over the simplest things for the past few weeks - and it is mostly because I am carrying so much for myself and others right now. Not to say that they tears were not appropriate ... but I haven't been allowing myself to feel my own pain, so it spills out when I see that of others.

I do not have to be good or walk on my knees -- or hold in my pain. 

Neither do you.

Wishing you space to feel all the feelings in safety.

Poetry Thursday, Self care and boundaries are hard...

Time-Lapse Video of Trans Woman Collapsing Inward Like a Dying Star
~Joshua Jennifer Espinoza

I beg for invisible fire.

Every night I pray to love,
please invent yourself.

I imagine a place after this place
and I laugh quietly to no one
as the hair on my chin
weeds through old makeup.

When I go to sleep
I am vinegar inside clouded glass.
The world comes to an end
when I wake up and wonder
who will be next to me.

Police sirens and coyote howls
blend together in morning’s net.
Once, I walked out past the cars
and stood on a natural rock formation
that seemed placed there to be stood on.
I felt something like kinship.
It was the first time.

Once, I believed god
was a blanket of energy
stretched out around
our most vulnerable
places,

when really,

she’s the sound
of a promise
breaking

Copyright © 2020 by Joshua Jennifer Espinoza. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 14, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

“Many of my poems involve figures who are desperately attempting to invent a means of survival under conditions that seem determined to prevent them from surviving. This poem is concerned with what happens when performing the daily magic of saving oneself becomes too tiring, so that the only remaining option is to scream out the pain, loneliness, and desperation, and allow the collapse to happen. This is a cry for help, one that enacts, through its own existence, proof of self-love and a desire to keep living, despite everything.”

—Joshua Jennifer Espinoza

This, too, is grief

When you lose someone you love, you expect grief. 

Ok, maybe you don't have a full grasp of how grief will be like a tidal wave until it isn't - and sometimes still because it cuts you at your knees or sucker punches you in the gut when you least expect it.

But grief as desperately wrenching as it is in its rawest form - that deep hole in your heart, is not only sadness and anguish.

Of course, everyone has heard of the stages of grief, which by the way were meant to describe a patient coming to terms with her/his own death not that of those bereaved. There is anger. There is denial. All of that along side, in between and at disparate times with the sadness and anguish.

I cannot speak to acceptance - unless you are talking about finally agreeing that your loved one is, indeed, dead - as in not coming back. Maybe. But I think lots of people forestall denial by assuming that they will be reunited at some point in the future or the after world. As I do not hold on to that hope, my denial did have to come to an end - but it lasted a good, long time - when I still saw my sister from the corner of my eye, driving by, escaping death even if it meant abandoning us as well.

But grief is also the aftermath.

This is the part that I don't think people talk about.

It has been a horrible place for me - and I imagine that it is for others as well.

Your life is reconfigured. You are told about the new normal when people can be honest about the fact that it does not get better, just different.

But I was wholly unprepared for the devastation that has been the aftermath in my family.

It's not like a war torn landscape with craters were there used to be houses. That seems so bleak and drastic ... but, sometimes, it really does feel that way.

Poetry Thursday

Souvenir
~Edna St. Vincent Millay 

Just a rainy day or two
In a windy tower,
That was all I had of you—
Saving half an hour.

Marred by greeting passing groups
In a cinder walk,
Near some naked blackberry hoops
Dim with purple chalk.

I remember three or four
Things you said in spite,
And an ugly coat you wore,
Plaided black and white.

Just a rainy day or two
And a bitter word.
Why do I remember you
As a singing bird?


This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on January 25, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.