My cousin has a terminal disease. She recently posted a meme with this thought:
“DEEP: Everyone in your life will have a last day with you.
And you don’t even know when it will be.”
I responded:
The amazing joy/
of Eternal Life: Some time/
there’ll be no last time.
She’s got nothin’ to say.
In my loneliness I can tell,
I’m under her spell,
But her checkmark is grey.*
[*Facebook instant messenger has a blue check when the message is read, a grey check when it hasn’t been read.]
Late at night I find/
myself wondering which path/
to take to reach her.
If we think people/
are throwing us under the /
bus, we should ask them.
I don’t pretend to know
what it felt like,
back then,
to be enslaved,
held captive,
beaten,
tortured,
or worse.
I don’t pretend to feel
what it felt like
to have the chains
loosed,
to have the bands
broken,
or to escape,
following the drinking gourd,
walking with dry feet
through the Red Sea,
to have the locks broken
on Dachau’s gates,
to sign my sacred honor to a Declaration.
I do not know the feelings of these,
or any other,
liberations.
I do not know that enslavement.
But I do know how my mind,
my heart,
my soul
has been enslaved
by self doubt,
by fear,
by Angst.
I have felt those shackles,
those binding chains,
the tyranny of my own mind
that held me fast to falsehoods
and stole my freedom.
Now I know, too,
gladly,
what it feels like
to be set free,
to have chains of sin loosed,
to have the yoke of self-doubt broke,
to have a partner and guide
help me
as I move
towards freedom.
Inspired by the writings of Marnie Kuhns, FrontPorchSense.com essay on Personal Freedom
I hear.
I feel.
I see.
I’ve gone quiet.
Ah, Marianne!
Ah, Trish!
Muses of the bench!
What moments I had
with you
(and Paul, and all)
in that small cafe.
Not for the discounted
pastries (past 9 p.m.)
came I,
but for the fuel
that filled me
from words tumbling
and singing
and screaming
from hearts
and souls
and minds.
How many
napkins
ripped I apart,
furiously scratching
short verse
that vented my brain.
Now?
Now,
so far from that place
I can’t even remember
its name;
So removed
from the Enliten’d
creative muse
that once
lit my flame;
I struggle
to have a voice,
to say what I must,
what I should.
My woods,
rocks,
rills,
temple’d hills
sing loud
and sweetly to me,
as wrens call
each morning
and wind and owls and coyotes and I
howl
each evening.
And I can capture that all,
that peace.
There is no torment,
no pain,
as there was so often
there.
Yet, here,
there is something still
missing,
a driving force
that came from knowing
each week,
on one night,
I needed to stand up
on wood-plank’d floors,
to raise my voice
toward a black and silver orb,
to lift my hands,
to clear my mind,
to speak for myself.
Today
I dusted off my writings,
walked through decades
of thought,
broken hearts,
emotions plus and minus.
Today
I gathered observations,
some of my best wonderings
from wanderings.
Bemused,
I smiled and grimaced
at both the genius
and the foolish silliness
that my fingers
had pounded or caressed
out of a dozen keyboards.
Mostly,
I question
not what I wrote,
nor that I wrote,
but what happened?
Why have I —
my fingers,
my mind,
my soul,
my heart —
gone
cold and silent?
This question perplexes me,
yet does not need to be answered.
The why
is not as important
as the turning from it,
the change,
the regeneration
of the creative flame.
The moving on.
The how?
I’m doing it now.
Though that black pill is/
hard and bitter to swallow, /
I must have more faith.
Your back may scream in /
agony, but poetry /
needs to be written.*
(or)
screams to be written.