After peace burns
Desire
Water on fire
Blue sky’d storm clouds
Higher
Rooted tree filed
To spires
Unceasing peak
Plus land sliding
Aflame and rumbling
Piercing and tumbling
Stillness makes space
For strange nature
All kinds
Human
Animal
Mine
-a.r
Painting: Treesong, artist unknown
I have been absent, mostly absent, from my writing and from engagement in my previous passions. I’ve always worked in fits and starts, but this time the fit of pausing has thrown me. I don’t know why I share the following musings here or now, except that I feel the need to write it down, and send it out, into the ether…
So I am sober, have been for over a year, and what has it done for me? It has made my body and brain healthier, connected the two, which holds great value for someone like me. But…it has also revealed a mess, a mess that I can now actually see and feel. When I was drinking, I was indeed also a mess, but I was numb enough to think I had the answers, or at least some answers. The problem with sobriety is that now I cannot turn away, or numb myself, from the glaring truth that I actually have NO answers. And, it has stopped me in my tracks. I have been stuck. How in the world can I be an activist, a thinker, a speaker, a creator, a lover, a liver (pun)….with no answers? I have felt helpless in the face of my own smallness, my own humanity, and the bigness of human searching and the world’s problems. This election has in no small way made this immobility worse. It has been a year of big changes, upheavals, disruptions, and hunkering down. But it has also been a year of grit, of connection, of tenacity, of learning to feel, love, and trust. Maybe now it is time to reexamine my small plot of land. Where do I now stand? Perhaps it is time to look down, and around, so I can know where to step…so I can know from where to leap, to begin my next “witch’s flight.”
I’ve always asked lots of questions, but I was comforted (comfortably numb) by thinking I had some answers to those questions. Now it seems clear to me that I do not have any answers, and may not ever. But, perhaps there is a space in this life for one who asks questions, a contrarian thinker, an embodied seeker, a dark and aberrant but curious creator. Maybe I start there, and just maybe there is value in that: knowing I am a human mess with no answers, but one with countless ways to ask hard questions…and one who is brave enough to know she may find no answers, but she still lives embodied each day, moving forward, asking and seeking anyway.
I defer to Samuel Beckett:
You must go on.
I can’t go on.
You must go on.
I’ll go on. You must say words, as long as there are any – until they find me, until they say me. (Strange pain, strange sin!) You must go on. Perhaps it’s done already. Perhaps they have said me already. Perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story. (That would surprise me, if it opens.)
It will be I? It will be the silence, where I am? I don’t know, I’ll never know: in the silence you don’t know.
You must go on.
I can’t go on.
I’ll go on.
…and so I will…
…and I’ll keep asking…
Image from the play Not I, by Samuel Beckett
Born 41 years
Ago tomorrow Am I
Born once more today
-a.r.
Painting by Vladimir Kush
Cracking teeth on jealousy
Brought chilly sensitivity
Best to numb and fill for now
A pause before the biting down
-a.r.
Art: Toothfairy by MertGurkan on deviantart.com
I carry pain
inside of me
A bullet lodged
on an artery
Best to leave it
love the scar
Than dig
and bleed out
where we are
-a.r.
No answers
Only fingers pecking keys
Questions tapping autumn ground
Beak sifting dirt before the freeze
Hollow bird in search of worms
To fill this gut and feed my young
To slow and satisfy the churn
Through barren days
Of winter’s burn
-a.r.
Photo: Fairytale about a little girl, who…
by http://laura-makabresku.deviantart.com/
I could peel back
These creaking floorboards
With my cracked bare hands
Splinters splitting finger tips
Wrecked flesh sliced and spilling cells
Of dying skin and sediment
And blood too thick from sitting
I could tear down
This cracked foundation
With only teeth for demo-tools
Old stone etching enamel
Tender dentin loosing resin
Amalgam dust and timely testing
Of this forlorn form for decimation
I could stay, create and stitch
A frame rebuilt from rot
With fractured hands and crumbled teeth
Reclaim this lot for something new
A Frankenstein of skin and stone
Of chomp and saw dust, jaw askew
With steel for flesh and brick for bone
-a.r.
Artwork: The Bride of Frankenstein by Bunny Bennet on deviantart.com
My soul
A coal mine
Buried below
Blind to light
A twisted ride
In an iron cask
The goal of thine
To crack and sift
These rocky walls
Become a heart
To find small bits
Of spark and shine
Stone set apart
Pressed in the dark
But picking bares
A precious find
Or poisoned gas
To keep or kill
This soul
Of mine
-amdr
Artwork: Coal Mine 14, by Douglas Kinsey
Today I wear a bracelet
Which is fifteen years old
I wear it this day every year
For life moments that it holds
It was made for us in gratitude
For being there and holding up
The families of those who suffered
That deadly day in Washington
Crafted by hand in Glory’s colors
That once were bright without a mark
Each year the colors fade a bit
And the beads become more scarred
At first I made an effort
To keep it quite pristine
But on this day I realize
Value is not in keeping clean
The dirt and scratches simply show
Fifteen years of life we’ve lived
We’re not defined by cracks and tears
But by what of ourselves we give
Dear bracelet, you’ll be on my wrist
On this day each and every year
Until one of us lets go that thread
Life well worn out for those not here
-a.m.d-r.
I repost this every year on this day, it’s not the best poem technically…but that doesn’t really matter today.
A picture of the bracelet made, and given to me, by a volunteer at the Pentagon days after September 11, 2001 to thank those of us who escorted families to view the site where their loved ones died that horrific day. I am proud to have stood there with them, to have wept with them, to have heard stories about their loved ones, to have been present, available. It is one of my saddest, but proudest, days in the military
Silence
Wrapped itself
Around my head
So tight
A vice
That caused
Skull seams to grind
And split
Old fontanels
To burst a bit
With ringing pitched
So high
And loud
It drowned all hope
And its own hush
Out
-a.r.
sometimesihatemycat 