In a time of complexity
we found simplicity
squishing apples in the
backyard
the rotten meat splaying
forth a core with
seeds of a new generation
open and athirst
as I walked through
the Garden of Eden where
we did not sin
no, we loved
we loved until bodies ached
ribs busting
hearts jumping to rhythm
yes, we loved
love has a taste
if tender time be taken
salt on skin as touched by dew
bodies laying together
under the moon of
a day’s work done.
Love thee not
yet I love thee so
plucking red rose petals
from the expectant surge
at the floodgates
where the lonesome awaits and
says please
love thee not
yet I love thee so
the lonesome awaits
for an extended hand
a swimmer who fails to grasp
and she sings her song
love thee not
yet I love thee so
release, let go.
Within insides
buried in insides
are expectations
held close to the bosom
that when you gaze
to the mirror
the face of God
gazes back
an image promised
expected
yet when a gaze
yields haze
the clouded judgment
of a
Los Angeles summer
you are confused
for where is God
and how must He
be found
in the muddled
breath
of dust and dross
which the mirror whispers
in the sly of its gaze
unforgivable
yet upon second look
He is there
the mystery unveiled
bewilderment and beguilement
rampant running in
wrinkles formed in the worries
of no matter
for to always look second glance
a friend looks back
lips upturned in smile
subtle
and all is well.
How many times must we lose ourselves in order to find ourselves? To act as miners digging through coal in the dark of night to find the light of diamonds? In the womb we have no voice, but we speak, for words are not requisite for speech. As our beings are born unto the earth and we grow as buds on stems, sound sticks like honey and words cannot resist the sweet entrapment. With voice, we find ourselves, and through finding ourselves, we dialogue as whispering mutters chattering in the theater before the play is to begin. For today is the rehearsal for tomorrow’s endeavor. When we lose voice, our primal communication from being to being, road to river, mountain to highway, we lose grasp of an essential component of our existence. In limbo we float, fruit in Jell-O in the ambrosia salad, until one outstretched finger tip joins with another, and life is renewed. Cold and cough may come as wayward visitors on the path to enlightenment, shake hands and stay for awhile, burrowing in the softness of tissues held to nose and mouth. Yet as birds fly north, cough does too, and lips elapse air, breath born to voice. As mountains we climb, we proclaim from lofty heights the supremacy of voice, and utter, as softly as the language of the womb, I have found myself again.
Carly Simon and clouds
in my coffee
take sips from the transit radio
of the train
I hopped on five minutes
ago
the seats of the train old
but refurbished like
someone’s grandma
went to town
had a field day
bleach up and down
side to side
side to side
my eyes dart
my eyes expecting
clouds
but no
clear skies the captain
says
I like this captain
he’s new so you know
the deliverance through
the storm
sounds fancy, right?
well, it is
fancy and fine
fine as frog’s hair
he says
I look down at yesterday’s
paper it speaks to me
read in the captain’s
voice the words
changing growing
disappearing appearing
rewritten
captain of the skies
clear as can be
wielder of the pen
the past unwritten.
I peruse shelves of knick knacks
teddy bears ears worn ragged
chewed bitten
wet with saliva speaking
love
and lollipops sit at the register
you know they’re liked you
can see tears
running down sloping sides
and you know this is a place
of love
and you know this is a place
where amity never runs dry
but I seem not to care
with my tongue I lick dust
from upper shelves
and crack the glass and squelch
the flames
of candles lighting the way
the local school children folded
cranes to heal and
I take more than I fold
and slowly drain the bucket
which I hold
I cast a sharp word an icy glance
and bite the hand that feeds me
and yet I wonder
where has goodwill gone when
I sit in solitaire biting not
but air
and rusting into immovability
unable to reach to grasp
fingertips that once
stretched back.
The hornets nest hovers
stings poised to strike
needles stable, calculated
veins athirst.
Don’t kick the hornets nest,
don’t kick me where
it will hurt.
Rather hitch me upon
a star,
a far distanced entity
that brings the broken
closer
to the fabric to which
the earnest cling,
for nothingness is a plight
empty and without grasp.
To know is to be free,
yet knowledge begs the
presence of pain;
sensation breeds it.
Hitch me to unadulterated
knowledge,
kick the hornets nest and
let me feel
nerves nudged,
for nothingness is a plight
empty and without grasp.
My skin is crawling. I am awake. No, my mind rests in sleep. My body will not be still; it yearns to move, convulses in response to the defibrillation rocking my body, rocking on waves. The electric system in my brain falters and sparks, electrical cords encasing me in a womb of wires spitting images. Do I cut the red or the green to escape? I contemplate, and then there is darkness.
Drenched in sweat, I jolt from sleep, my heart racing, my skin still crawling. The nightmares are increasing in frequency. I warm the shower, strip to nakedness, and step over the edge of the tub into its basin. The water drenches my hair and washes away the salty residue upon my skin. The shower head holds pressure upon my scalp. Pressure. My head held in place. I taste the saltiness of the sweat clothing my body and gag. I gag and gag as the shower continues to run, the contents of my stomach threatening mutiny. Finally the gagging subsides, and I allow the water to flow, to carry away the saltiness and cleanse. Pruned fingertips turn the nob to off and the water ceases to flow.
Trauma poses a challenge to intellectual capacity, and a greater challenge to the brain’s propensity for emotional understanding. Post traumatic stress disorder. Seeing the letters strung into words on my after visit summary posed a challenge to my psyche. I carry an intellectual understanding of trauma. An event happened that has triggered a litany of effects. But emotionally, I am swimming in the deep blue.
My eyeballs betray me. Stop showing me those images, I warned you. I did not pay the admission fee. The anxiety and angst swell and crest as waves in my empty stomach. I claw at my eyeballs, scratching the retinas. The pictures stop with the swiftness in which they appeared. With equal swiftness, the monster appears. Watch out, for none are spared.
There is a diagnosis of acute PTSD, meaning it may resolve, and also chronic PTSD, which lingers indefinitely, my psychiatrist explained to me. My right hand extended and contracted around a plastic squishy toy I had bought at the Dollar Tree to relieve stress. Extend and contract. Extend and contract. I agreed to return in a month.
The empty bucket has made home in my gut, and I cannot seem to fill it, despite earnest attempts to add substance to an emptiness seemingly interminable. I throw in long-depleted cartons of milk, egg shells, empty oatmeal boxes, a half-drunk canister of orange juice, but nothing amasses to the amount necessary to ease the pain. I pick garbage from the street, go to parks and dig through bushes, finding cans of beer and bottles of soda pop. Despite quantity, insufficiency prevails.
I ask myself, why such hesitancy? I divulged the revelation of my newfound cognizance of my empty attempts to fill the naggingly hollow bucket. I am doing it wrong, I told her. Why such hesitancy? I have been inhaling with a stutter. I smoothed a honey lavender balm on the back of my throat so maybe I will breathe with ease. Why have I hesitated to act in the direction of my wellness?
Daily I pick the garbage from my bucket. I try to not litter inside the receptacle, but cluttered littering is inevitable. As I discard trash, I remind myself, hesitancy will not heal, but only hinder health.
Coffee beans ground finely, roasted into a toasty but stringent espresso. Over the darkness two poles are poured, milk and cream, the pauper and the prince. The elements combine to form the color of life, discernible and livable, clouds and shadows swirling on the gentle landscape.
I had called the psychiatric emergency crisis line two nights in a row. The therapist on the other end could feel the tickling tentacles of my demons reaching through the airwaves and requested I come into the emergency department to be evaluated. The air in the ED was thick, heavy, and populous, yet there was not enough to sustain a single breath. The tentacles were misbehaving, spreading to great reaches and tapping shoulders of others. I had not eaten in close to twelve hours, my receptacle empty and my reserves slim.
The evaluating therapist tamed the tentacles long enough for me to get my story out. The illustrations were old comic book style, bold colors and patterns, but little shading. Little bits and pieces of our conversation stick on the post-it note covered wall of my brain. Central nervous system suppression. Trauma. Maladaptive coping mechanisms and behaviors. Apparently my story was publishable, earning a coveted spot with the exclusive board of directors at the hospital, the individuals who were the news and who told the news.
Being on the board of directors was quite interesting. My tenure was short-lived, only six days. Sometimes the overseers allowed respite from rigidity of the duties of formulating and planning, and the board members could dance in unadulterated bliss to the beats of Uptown Funk and shake booty to popular rap songs.
The tentacles were retreating and retracting, and the smog in my brain lifting. Puppet strings pulled the corners of my mouth upward, an action foreign to the nerves firing to my facial muscles. I left the board of directors well respected and soared with a proper farewell.
The darkness of the depths of the brain, where depression and the evils reside, becomes mitigated by the paupers and princes of life, the poor and rich experiences that serve to draw color to the darkness. Through acceptance of the dialectic existence of the poor and the rich, darkness lightens. Last week I experienced my thirteenth hospitalization. Acceptance has the capacity to color my espresso differently and to alter the fabric of existence upon which I reside.
Have you ever confused a dream with life? Or stolen something when you have the cash? Have you ever been blue? Or thought your train moving while sitting still? — Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted.
I am gripping the steering wheel of my 2006 bright red Toyota Prius, my left hand poised around 7:00 to 8:00, cycling through contractions and releases as I navigate. It is four days post incident, yet the numbness and waves of nausea-heart pounding in chest-hard to breath episodes still percolate to the surface, defiantly bubbling over the lid I have firmly secured to withhold intrusion. Bubbles in my chai with espresso. I cringe, but I swallow and move on.
The truck to the left of me accelerates in the far right hand lane, making way for my merge onto I-5. Drop an ice cube on the back of my neck, and I promise you I will not feel it. Stub your cigarette butt on my forearm, and no, I will not feel it. The numbness has rolled in with the stealth of fog, and I breathe. I expect the air to be thick, but it slides down my trachea smoothly like butter. I am grounded to the seat of my car, my nerves registering the feel of weathering fabric ten years loved. My body is still, but around me, my train moves.
But I know, movement is an illusion, stillness the reality. I must not float in the stagnant pond; rather, body surf in the rising tide. As humans, we become hinged to things of the nether annals of the world. I hold my tweezers, and as I write, I sit here picking thread by thread, cutting each string with sewing scissors, slowly allowing movement to manifest as reality once again, a dream awakening to the world with the curiosity and determination of a baby’s first breath.
Dance With Madness 