Recovery, Jazz and Other Winding Roads

 
Hi, my name is Maureen and I am addicted to my sadness.

The first step to recovery is admitting that you have a problem
with this neck-deep muck and mire;
Dire hand like quicksand
(such slow but steady sinking)
wrapped around my throat.

Step two:

“Hope is the thing with feathers”,
Yet tethered to eternity
clings distrust,
wings weathered from
what could have been,
but never was now lost.

Step three is my neck cocked to the side
gut-wrenching
with holey wrists hung to bear my
torture stake:
“Father into your hands, I entrust my spirit.”

I have had the wind shot up my spine
and clear out my body
trying to climb step four,
trying to third world war myself dead in the mirror--
demons dancing circles around my reflection,
rejection and all.

Step five is
my blood spilled upon this page
and me begging your forgiveness

I stay stuck, back-bucked-body-doubled
on the likes of number six.
I mean what does that even mean?
To be ready to change?
To say "I will feel this joy if it kills me
in its making"?

Step seven is not your
run-of-the-mill Hail Mary
Is not "Our father which art in heaven
hallowed be thy name..."
It is my nose to the dirt
a sweat and snot elixir
staining the ground inches beneath my face
praying 'God don't break my beat-down soul.'

Step Eight ways to say I'm sorry:
I'm sorry for being here
and not really being here.

I am sorry I let you down again.
I am sorry I didn't pick up the phone.
I am sorry my quiet is so obnoxiously loud.
I am sorry my sadness is shaped like pride.
I am sorry that sorry is never enough.

Step nine is my finger on the trigger
aimed directly at his heart,
shooting bullets made of candy kisses
until he lets me in.

There is no step ten,
but rather an up-hill of patched ice
and misunderstanding.
Though the slope seems steep,
keep my eyes at my feet
and toward infinity may my aching arm ever reach.

When life hands you lemons,
eleven will not make the lemonade,
but will shift your focus from that closest
sour pulp sadness
to the raw sugar that is in the honey and the trees and
that one jazz standard that makes
puckered and sunk-in cheeks
seem sweeter.

And step twelve?
Twelve is you closing this page

and hoping you can still hear me.

ABOUT: I wrote this years ago, but was talking recently with a friend about how difficult it is to accept that you have a mental illness. Largely because our society as a whole has for so long put a stigma on any kind of condition that doesn't have visible symptoms. Please know you are not alone.

Nocturne

No one questioned the wolf’s alternatives

(if there was any other way

For a wolf to be born).

It is too easy to look at its glaring grin, 

Feel the edge of its howl cutting into your bone

And prefer it dead over living.

No one said to the wolf

“Here, take this soft fuzz

Take these Big, bug-round eyes

Take these dulled and docile teeth,

I grant you the un-alarming geste 

Of a rabbit.”

I was bomb

Catapult with violence 

into an immense and darkening night.

It was not calm I was gifted, but

Claws— that I may fight my way out this night.

I was given teeth

And a loud song.

My eyes were never meant to be a warning;

When you see two rays emanating golden in the black,

Please know I, too, was born in fear of this dark.

But I can see now.

I thank Jehovah God 

for this sight.

about//  the survival tactics of a wolf.

On Salami

Here we are, yet again.

(“We” being people and I;

True, I am also a person,

But by no means am I “People.”)

So. Here we are. 

The People are speaking with such fervor about salami.

Fresh-cut butcher’s salami.
Does it taste good with turkey rye and provolone questionmarkquestionmarkexclamationpoint

The way Chucky winks butchering the salami.

One of The People thinks he is cute—
Chucky, winking and smirking
through the smeared plexiglas like that.

Another has crossed him off as creepy,
is willing to drive five miles out of the way to Publix
because Ain’t no man need to be winking at me anyhow.

“I prefer Greek-Italian Salami,
it’s just better you know what I mean, Maureen?”

The lights dim. The room silences in perfect harmony.

A chilling east wind slams the door shut.

Everything I know about lunch meat is spinning around my head. 

Suddenly the universe itself is revolving around

My core beliefs on salami.

Naturally, I have none.

“You’re so quiet!” The People revolt.

I apologize profusely,

Though for what I’m not sure.

For once, I want to know what it feels like

To be impassioned by the sort of talk that

Has no middle, beginning or end

ABOUT: if I had a dollar for every time I had nothing of value to add to a conversation, I could afford to Airbnb a cabin in the middle of the woods for a week.

Principia- The Physics of Fight

One, “every object persists in its state of rest

Or uniform motion in a straight line
unless it is compelled to change
that state by forces impressed on it.”

My mother thought she was carrying a boy.

(This was before most realized that
Woman, too, can be synonymous with warrior.)

I was going to be named “Harry.”

Harry the quarterback, bulldozing touchdowns in her belly.

Or Harry the Samurai, hai-ya! Take that, Pre-birth placental swine!

I have been persisting (insisting) in this state of uniform rage 

Encaged in it, foaming and seething incurable cage.

Will You now be said force that compels me to change?

Two, 

We were two creatures entwined

In a warfare so fine

That from afar we looked more like lovers

Decelerating faster than the speed of light

(this is the part of the poem

where time stood still)

Three, 

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction:

In spite of this rage, I love you

Out of spite for this rage, I love you

For all of this anger there is an equal and opposite quantum of joy.

About: anger and fight and joy- all of which have curiously coexisted in my belly since birth.

Firestarters

(dedicated to all of my spiritual brothers worldwide)

Hey beautiful human,

I like the way your arteries light up the x-ray

Like muscle boom thunder

Life strike a matchbox like lightning 

And it was good. 

So good, in fact, that from the bony chamber of his chest

God plucked a crystal-dipped rib of its cage 

And with it painted Woman.

And she too was good.

So good, in fact, that Woman, skilled woodsman of words

Like lightning struck speechless;

Enlightened to speak less but feel more.

Poured out but filled more with respect for

Your faith that infuriates the fire

And love that incites that fire to glow higher,

Grow higher to where its smoke can smother the night.

Flame lick the cold, choke off the throat from which

The Devil doubted.

Heat re-rerouted to where you lead it to burn.

Turned and taught by the forest's finest boughs.

My God knows, you have been so Good.

Crimson Army

(dedicated to all of my spiritual sisters worldwide)

Did you know that Jesus has hands?

Though holey palms bear witness of our sins

(And still they cup new seeds)

Though holy, only-begotten, Papa's right-hand man

(And still they humble themselves
 that those seeds may take root)

Though wholly existing without the womb of a woman

(And still solely able to paint our fields blood red).

Is the color of a battleground 

That against all odds yields a crimson camellia army.

Her faith reach the root shoot up to the stigma,

(It is here the bees meet their match

Smothered in wax, now ready to be reborn.)

"She is clothed with strength and splendor";

Every petal and peduncle breathing testimony to this truth.

The weeds, the shovel, the creeping weevil and the hoe

All conspiring to kill

All aspiring to know:

Who would win the war,

The bomb or the bud?
Well, it's the camellia, of course.
And what's more,

The middlemist red shoots her pistil into the sky.

ABOUT: The Middlemist Red Camellia. "Surviving the twists and turns of history, climates of different continents and even bombings, these meaningful rarest camellias can definitely serve as a vivid lesson for the human race." -Arena Flowers India

Proverbs 31

Syria, My Beloved

One

There is this kid,

Maybe he's six,

Maybe he just embodies what a six-year-old

Is supposed to look like,

The point is-

He is the kind of small that could crawl into a 

Cougar's den without getting caught.

Yet, not small enough to escape the 

The manchild's draft.

Two

Draft

(Noun)

A current of cool air moving in a closed space

Three 

A current of boy army, of toy soldier, breeze in to

Enclose Damascus.

Four 

The bowels of his mother turn

(A ghost-womb belly kick

At the flashflood of her baby boy's face)

Churn into wanting,

Then rumble into waste.

At last she has emptied herself of him.

Five

Who

Really 

Is

More 

Death

Than

A

Woman 

Bereft?

Six

The soft skin inside his elbow

Is tickled by a

Smooth, round bomb:

The corner of his lips crinkle

Upward at the "touch" of her

"Fingertips".

Seven

From miles across Aleppo's rubble,

The child and his bomb

Could be confused for a 

Mother cradling her suckling infant

Until he falls asleep full of milk,

Pool of it dribbling down his chin.

Eight

There are two types of hunger:

The kind you can kill 

Or the kind that kills you.

Nine:

And so they salvage their own city,

Bullying milk from a thin bovine's breasts,

Desperate cannibal feeding off his own flesh.

The streets reek of hurt and desolation.

Ten:

Scrawny-man-with-big-anger-

But-her-little-boy's-eyes bumps her at the market.

He turns in her stomach

Yanks back her breath.

Death is a living thing

She calls it by his name.

ABOUT// A Syrian boy soldier and his mother

Isaiah 2:4- He will render judgment among the nations and set matters straight respecting many peoples. They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning shears. Nation will not lift up sword against nation, nor will they learn war anymore.