I keep asking myself one question. Over and over. What is a poem? To what purpose? You see, since I've been unemployed for close to eight months now, my view of all things has changed. I no longer have the luxury of thinking about luxuries and even the smallest purchase is weighed against its equivalent victual. To the life I knew, the feeling is akin to standing on a dock and watching a great ocean liner leave on holiday, the band is playing, streamers in the air, the languid push signaled by horn, and there you are, feet planted, waving goodbye to a life you used to have, a life your friends still have. And so, the poem? I can't eat it. I can't turn my lamp on with it. It won't protect me from the rain or put a book in my son's backpack. So why do I care to read and write? What is this need that sits alongside hunger and thirst, and, if I am honest, pride and embarrassment, depression and humiliation. I don't know the answer, which makes me smile because it fits the rest of my wardrobe--the longing and need of things not needed that tease me as the whore who dances before my eye but beyond my reach.
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There are days I want to rake leaves as if there were treasure and I were digging; and somehow the self that walked back into the house would be different than the self that walked out, with amatory need, to lade refuse, the hair of a tree into the product of a tree, to put on the curb with no sense of irony, dumb as {censored} stone.
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I see people smiling and I wonder what language they speak; I wonder why we never spoke that language while growing up; I wonder why I struggle so to learn it now. I swear it looks like a foreign language to me; and I don't know how people do it, so many, so naturally. I really do find smiles wonderful, in the way of a fan watching an athlete do things he can't do. And for the life of me, and I've thought on this often, I cannot comprehend or understand why smiling seems so hard, for me, why, when I do smile, the thought is never far from my mind, that somewhere, somehow, someone is about to slap that silly grin from my face.
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The head of a horse is bigger than it looks. As too the eye (look for yourself if you don't believe me). And I wonder if the larger eye is like a larger lens, if it sees more, sees with greater detail and clarity and in the seeing, imagines a different world where a warm day and a field of grass is all that is needed, and even, perhaps, all that is wanted.
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I look upon my kitchen counter and wonder at the fruit--a couple apples, a handful of oranges and one ripening avocado sitting off to itself--I wonder of their fate, sitting as if on death's row, having been plucked from life, but now waiting, not for firing squad or even burial, but to be eaten, devoured, consumed with the most horrible suckling sounds of teeth and lips and tongue upon their ripe, plump flesh. So don't ever ask me why I don't smile in the kitchen. Life has been given so that we might live. I don't see anything funny about it, my skin sunburned from the day's harvest, about as red as the apple in my hand.
13 comments:
Because we also need to make and take beauty. It's a human need of the special ones.
Welcome Home, Dear One.
;=)
I, personally, do not see why your poetry and writing doesn't do exactly what you think it won't. I believe you're on that shore, waiving in another ship, my friend. It may be a bit out - maybe entirely off the horizon - but it exists all the same.
You stand on a precipice. You read and write another page to be turned...and turn, I promise, it will.
Never stop. Just the joy and tears and love and dreams that you inspire in others (that you insprire in me) is enough to justify the process itself, dear man.
Aggie, you are a very sweet woman, sweet like watermelon dripping down my chin, like pigtails in the memory of my hands as rope, like the cool breeze of dusk slipping between the valleys of flesh in the back of a pickup truck, wearing boots and hats and not much else.
C, always good to be home. Well, almost always good. :-D
Limes, could be. Maybe I need to be spanked. Maybe that would help. :-D
{clink}
Not spanked. I can't stand hitting. I think you need to be held very close and lovingly by someone who comforts you.
I recently asked someone to hold me. It was a beautiful thing.
{Clink}
Teehee...the look on my face, if only you can imagine it, is part grin, part blush and part mischevious-come-hither grin....particularly regarding the back of a pickup truck.
You do have a way of pushing exactly the right button. ;D
Oh, I can. Or should I say, I have. :-D
I began a comment for this post the other day:
Golf balls and pebbles, Poppet, your writing is a golf ball to you and, blessedly, to those who read it. Perhaps this thought might bring an answering smile when the question poses. To give great joy, to be the golf balls of other people's lives, to do so daily, is something grand indeed and if not all eyes, it should be, the best we can be, the best we can do. How beautifully you do write these words however and the force that drives them is clear and perceivable, particularly so when one knows a little of the time that is spent pondering, writing, editing, finding accompanying images, responding and so forth.
Will start over later today.
My dearest Autumn, you are very kind. Maybe I should take up golf. ;-)
You would have a head start in that you like colours. Unplanned hectic day today, but I hope to continue tonight. Hope you have a wonderful day, Tennessee, x
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