Quick write on this icky feeling:
I want to be Diego Rivera lost in the braids of peasant girls and flowers. I want a quiet space where I can hear the deep and gentle voice telling me I am blessed. I want the green leaves of the plant at my desk to make me smile. I want to smile and mean it. I want to pull out my heart through the blades of my bones and study it. Draw it like a scientist. To know why it beats, and why it hurts today. The recovering addicts were on their porch this morning singing Glory to God as I walked by the bus. I shouted my hello and waved through the city early morning noise. Once I forgot to bring a good lunch, when there was a bowl of oranges at home. I was sad, but then discovered a coworker had brought a bag of organic oranges from my back yard. That is God providing me juicy deliciousness. I woke up at 530 am and didn’t want to get out of bed. A minute later it was 6am and I still didn’t want to get out of bed at 610 I realized I better get out of bed because I don’t want to be that girl running late to work, when she could have been that girl using her morning to enjoy life for a minute. Do I hate work, just because I need something to hate. If it wasn’t work would I find something else. Is it me am I displacing my self hatred on my surrounding or does my job suck the life out of me. I don’t know how to find the answer to this question. I could A)change the variables Jobs and see if I still hate work. But I have fear that when I leave this jungle of fronting sanity, I might find a thicker worse jungle of who knows what and I will regret leaving my ergonomic chair and paycheck. B) I could change variable attitude: I have been trying this daily. I have been trying to try. Poetry is like cutting my toenails.
On a more serious note: What kind of tea do you drink? Does it get the frog out of your throat? How about the newt and the lizard? How about all the unanswered questions you can not answer because of propriety. How about all the icky feelings you have under skin but you cant voice because you know you are being unreasonable.
1 comment:
I drink lot's of tea. The tea doesn't help always. Only sometimes.
More effective than taking things inside me to cure what ails me, is taking things out: the scream or throwing things work wonders. I reccomend it.
A poem for you today (the formatting will be screwed up since it's in a comment but), I think you need it. It's long but good.
Book V: Rebirth – Ten
from Healing Earthquakes
by Jimmy Santiago Baca
If it does not feed the fire
of your creativity, then leave it.
If people and things do not
inspire your heart to dream,
then leave them.
If you are not crazily in love
and making a stupid fool of yourself,
then step close to the edge
of your heart and climb
where you’ve been forbidden to go.
Debts, accusations, assaults by enemies
mean nothing,
go where the fire feeds you.
Turn your attention to the magic of whores,
grief, addicts, and drunks, until you stumble upon
that shining halo surrounding your heart
that will allow you to violate every fear happily,
be where you’re not supposed to be,
the love of an angel who’s caught your blood on fire
again, who’s gulped all of you in one breath
to mix in her soul, to explode her brooding
and again, your words rush from the stones
like a river coursing down
from some motherly mountain source,
and if your life doesn’t spill forth
unabashedly, recklessly, randomly
rushing in wonder at life,
then change, leave, quit, silence the idle chatter
and do away with the useless acquaintances
who have forgotten how to dream,
bitch rudely in your dark mood at the mediocrity
of scholars who meddle in whimsy for academic trifles—
let you be their object of scorn,
let you be their object of mockery
let you be their chilling symbol
of what they never had the courage to do, to complete, to follow,
let you be the flaming faith that makes them shield their eyes
as you burn from all sides
taking a harmless topic and making of it a burning galaxy
or shooting stars in the dark of their souls
illuminating your sadness, your aching joy for life,
your famished insistence for God and all that is creative
to attend you as a witness to your struggle,
let useless banter and quick pleasures
belong to others, the merchants, computer analysts
and government workers;
you haven’t been afraid
of rapture among thieves,
bloody duels in drunken brawls,
denying yourself
the essence of your soul work
as poems rusted while you scratched
at your heart to see if it was a diamond
and not cheap pane glass,
now, then, after returning from one more poet’s journey
in the heart of the bear, the teeth of the wolf,
the legs of the wild horse,
sense what your experience tells you,
your ears ringing with deception and lies and foul tastes,
now that your memory is riddled with blank loss,
tyrants who wielded their boastful threats
to the sleeping dogs and old trees in the yards,
now that you’ve returned from men and women
who’ve abandoned their dreams and sit around
like corpses in the grave moldering with regret,
steady your heart now, my friend, with fortitude
long-lasting enduring hope, and hail the early dawn
like a ship off a coast that’s come for you,
spent and ragged and beggared,
if what you do and how you live does not feed the fire
in your heart and blossom into poems,
leave, quit, do not turn back,
move fast away from that which would mold your gift,
break it, disrespect it, kill it.
Guard it, nurture it, take your full-flung honorable
heart and plunge it into the fire
into the stars, into the trees, into the hearts of others
sorrow and love and restore the dream
by writing of it’s again-discovered wild beauty.
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