[1] Laughing Steel

I’m wilting a little. But not for long.

Hundreds of tiny birds swarm peacefully in their flocks around the stoplights. The tree frogs and bullfrogs are awake and are singing again in the swamps and the sunlight is bursting into our Saturdays. The rain is getting warmer.

Any hint of smoke in the air throws me back to memories of camping through the long and delicious, warm Julys. Cooking dinner over the campfire, the smell of the wood left in my sweatshirt for days. We’d cook sausage and even though I rarely eat it, during the summer I love the salt and smoke on my tongue.

My creative focus has waned a little bit. I daily question the validity of the words floating around in my head whether they are just the playthings of my mind when it reaches levels of boredom from living in the same town everyday or whether they might actually mean something.

I give them meaning today.

No one questions dreams when they wake up. Of course, they are mostly absurd. But no one questions if they saw the vivid colors, or if they actually heard you say what you did. If your grandfather who passed years ago came to visit you in your sleep, and he smiles and asks how you are, you believe he was there. If the dreams are full of new and violent thunderstorms or a taunting and jeering man with a cane who can only be seen by you, we never question those truths.

“I mean, I was there.” “I saw you. You were there.” “I dreamt about Grandaddy last night.” “But the storm was so real!” “And there was this man, and he never stopped…”

And yet, simple things like poems that are woven when I step into a greenhouse, or the book I want to write about you when I realized how beautiful you are when you poured out your soul and sang in front of me, or the instant pain that rushes to my reddening cheeks when you wield your words like daggers and you act as if they have no more weight than paper snowflakes–I question all these.

Somehow a dream with smoky thunderstorms can be life-altering, and yet I can’t allow the pictures and poetry and ideas and words that run in rivers through my veins and ateries all day fill me up and run back out.

It’s like I’m working on the skyscraper of my soul, and as I build I consider each steel beam and tell a few that they aren’t worth keeping. I tug with white knuckles to pull them away from the frame. My building either collapses or the beams remain in place and laugh at me through grey teeth.

Because each piece is essential.

To all the words and pain I’ve left behind, declared void, ignored, brushed away, talked myself out of, I give meaning to today.

(Number 1)

Ava Marie

But I want to know why you miss me.

Because you’re sending me mixed signals and confusing all the sense out of me. Because I think there might have been more going on and I didn’t even know it. Because you sent me a picture of your newborn little girl, and even though she is beautiful like the flowers springing up, I don’t even know what to say anymore.

Nothin’ but a Ragdoll

Because I worry.

It’s like even after I take time to quiet the chattering inside my own head, I still have a fist gripping my stomach and fingers creeping up the back of my neck to tell me something isn’t right. Or that I’m not perfect enough to sit down just yet.

Worry has it’s purpose–if for nothing else but to motivate. But my mind has escalated to the point where worry has fed on my peace of mind and my thoughts are now laced with guilt.

Guilt has been an exterior motivator in my life for so long from multiple sources growing up that my mind has trained itself to go into overdrive and it slowly gnaws at me until I have nothing left to offer but a ragdoll heart.

The logic goes like this: In order to protect myself from further nagging, guilting, anger, or awkward conversations, if I can worry ahead of time before the conversation even happens, then maybe I’ll altogether prevent or avoid what might invariably happen, and we can all go on living happy lives.

It’s a feeling that if there is even one person in my life who has a different opinion or has different preferences or just flat out thinks I’m wrong, I have no equilibrium in my life. I’m left crippled by my own doing. Because, as I’ve been told before: “the holy life is the life that everyone else is happy with.”

My emotional logic is still in [this is so messed up] knots.

If I intend to be anything but play-dough for everyone else to put their hands around and squish into the shape of their own liking, I will never be able to live this life. Instead of learning to operate with a functioning spine, the worry throws me into the cupboard with all the other chipped plates and I am out of balance.

The choices I make in life should make me a little bit stronger each day, like learning to walk or use rollerblades for the first time. With each step or each time I pull out the skates my ankles grow stronger out of practice and dilligent use. But instead, as of now my ankle is twisted and I’m still hanging on desperately to the crutches beneath my shoulders when I don’t have to be.

Because I worry.

Black and White Ants

Even the cakes and black ants cannot contain
the messes we’ve made for ourselves.
I spend hours in the kitchen
baking cakes of red anger
and black silk using
white knots of worry as frosting.

I’d hold your hand and play
ring-around-the-rosy
but we’re just

spinning in circles in spinning in circles in spinning in circles and spinning in circles

and we
are
getting
nowhere.

It’s all coming up and coming out loud
and I don’t know if I can stop myself this time from using the handle
as a ledge into a life
of apathy
woven into tears.

You ask if I’m okay,
you ask if I’m fine,
and I reply why yes! I’m as well as I was yesterday
(for whatever it’s worth)
because even though I tire of being in the same town every morning
I’m never quite tired enough to leave.

We eat dinner and lunch and dinner again and we keep running our mouths
like engines in ten year old cars.
We fill our ears with kindling and spew petroleum,
our tongues spit the sparks.

The fire will climb up into our souls.

We eat a dinner of fruits of overdone thought and a roast of timidity and
we’ll keep plunging our forks into the food and passing the bowls to the others at the table
but there never is an end to our hunger.

We’ll spill the wine of selfishness
and the milk of fear to make it go away
but there is no end to our hunger.

It’s the ache
the anger
our elbows on the table cloths.

Dinner is finally removed from the table and dessert is brought in.
After we finish our plates we sit and cry
because even though the cake was decadent!
delicious!
delectable!
delightful!
we howl because our stomachs are emptier than before.

We’ll take blood, we’ll take water! Whatever fills the holes inside.

You ask if I can help with dishes and I do not reply because I eat the black and white cake alone at the other end of the table.

Even the black ants cannot clean up the messes we’ve made for ourselves.
I spend hours in the kitchen
baking cakes of red anger and
black silk using
white knots of worry as frosting.

You ask if I’m okay,
you ask if I’m fine, and I reply why yes! I’m as well as I was yesterday
because I eat my misery alone.