My head is a jigsaw puzzle.
Every once in a while
If I have a lot of quiet time to focus
I manage to put together enough of it
I can almost make out the image
I can almost touch
Enlightenment
And then life shows up
With his goddamn beer bong
And his asshole friends
Somebody starts swinging punches
And they knock over the whole table.
Poetry can be boring.
But every once in a while
A poem cuts right through the fog
Grips your collar
Forces you to pay attention.
A good poem
Runs through you like a trickle of ice water.
A good poem
Is fleet and cannot be caught.
A good poem
Creeps quiet like ivy
Until it coats the inside of your mind
And you are besotted.
A good poem
Leaves a mark where it touched you
Red like a new bruise
Red like a lipstick kiss
When I was a child
Time and I were friends.
We used to sit together
Enjoying the sunset through the trees
Spending evenings after dark watching fireflies
Just feeling the cool air nip at our fingertips.
But time and I had a falling out.
I stopped communing with her. I started making demands.
I told her what to do, what needed to be done. She was never enough for me.
She fled
As time is wont to do
I chased her too hard
But time cannot be tamed
She must be approached with respect.
When you calm down
She’ll come back and join you.
But only if you give her a place to sit.
Watching Kato kitty be sick is difficult
I sort of understand his pain
It’s not like raging menstrual cramps are the same as recovering from surgery
But I know what it is to feel like shit
For hours
When all you can do is whimper
And you’re too miserable to keep fluids or meds down
And your world is just pain, and nausea, and the hope that it’ll be over
I know what that is
I also know
What it is to be alienated
To walk around with a little touch of a serial killer inside you
To watch people cry
And feel like some kind of unbreakable spirit
But ten layers down you ache to know that release
Respect and envy their vulnerability
And wonder what it is
To be human
We are made by what we used to be
I have been given this compassion
I am grateful
To have been there
And to be back
Even if it’s just
So I can give a cat sympathetic pets
When my mom died
One person broke through to me
One
She listened
She asked questions
But most important
She did not pity
And because she regarded me as one with strength
I was able to be weak in front of her
Because she had watched her father die
She had that perfect compassion
The kind that really means something
I hope to be
A little bit about overcoming my emotional repression. This one was hard to share, I actually wrote it yesterday but didn’t have the courage to share it until now. Funny, what I’m afraid of.
What an emotional day.
I felt crazy at work to start with
The photographer’s flattery got me off keel
Then I got screamed at by a random road rager
Though I thought I took it well, when I got home I cried
But… in the photographs, my smile is real
And the tears had come freely
For me, this is a big step forward.
I rewatched a show and it had more import
And I thought, oh my God,
I’ve been missing out on so much of the storytelling experience
I’m going to have to read all the classics over again
Goddamnit all.
Sarah D. Silvey 