Sara

Occasionally I find my words, golden and flowing and there. I find them sitting, waiting for me as though I was the one who walked off and left them alone. They swim and sing and coax. I feel like something again. They're not the words for work although I have more and more of those that I collect and pin together. They let me write at work as if they do not know how dangerous that sort of thing can be. Once I turn one phrase, I want to turn them all over and over, find their secret places and unlock the hearts of the words. Twist ribbons of language to bind my hands in. They do not know how they tempt and torture me with the little I am given. They do not know what they do.

I am what I am and I am this. I am the flowing phrase and the word drawn out and lucid on your tongue. I have five meanings in a handful of letters held together by something that says hope. I do not know how to be this, and we hurt each other all the time because I ache with it and lie dormant and withdrawn without it. I do not know what to feed it, and it wants everything inside of me. There is so little to feed this fire, its phantom flames curling out from my heart.

My skin fits and does not fit here. I write strings of words in RP that read like lines of poetry or song lyrics. I embed myself so deeply into them that I ache keenly. I never asked to be word made flesh. I am no good at keeping either part happy. It hears music, and it goes, "Why can't we be that?" It reads a poem and begs, "Why can't we be that?"

All I can do is tell it, "I don't know. I'm sorry. I never made the connection."

Disconnect

My body is always disappointing me.
It goes left when I tell it right
And we never end up where we
Should be. I go chasing it down hallways
To put on the proper shoes.

We live like feuding roommates
In a giant house, one at either end
Shouting our wishes down staircases
Like a game of telephone, everything
Always interpreted wrong.

It invites people over, and I turn
Them away at the door. I say social
So it suddenly decides it can't deal
With being seen and that my favorite
Things are no welcome.

I become the only kind of princess
I know how to be: the one sequestered
In her own tower, no one coming to save
Her because of all the no trespassing
Signs and a refusal to let down her hair.

One day I'm going to crack open the wall I've been steadily building around my heart and soul, continually building, brick upon brick so that it's gotten so thick no light falls in but just reflects back into its own space, an echo. One day it's all going to crumble or crash, fast or slow I don't know yet because I am too timid to take the hammer to it. I cannot find my pick ax, and I prefer building to destroying anyway. Still it must go. All this wide wide world is one sharp knife. All this wide wide world is one heart break and one misunderstanding and one misspoken word and one lost look after another. I don't know to how to hear anyone but you, and I have trouble understanding anyone but me when it comes to all this rushing noise. Please stop shouting at me with everything you don't say. Please just lay things out nice and neat, in colored lines like graphs and bar charts. Please make me a list that flows. I need directions from point A to point B. Don't confuse me with point C because I just can't take it anymore.

I feel like a very young girl taking care of the entire world with no one stepping up to take care of me. I can't stop talking about myself, yet I spend all my time thinking of you, of me, of the wall, of the great big wide wide world standing out there shivering, arms outstretched. How can I ever embrace it without losing every single thing that is mine? How can I possibly make the hurting stop, make the sadness lessen, fix the pain, when I can't make myself stop crying some nights? Why isn't anything easy; why is love not love? I can never understand how words from my mouth mean something different than when those same words fly from yours.

I want to be like Eliot's hollow men, but I am full to bursting with words and tears and worries and love. Love for everything and anyone I can touch and find and fix. Love for anyone I can care for and then turn away from. I will build my walls and fix your heart, carefully, with duct tape and glitter glue. I can sing songs to you when no one is looking. Just don't let them into the doors of my walled fortress, my bramble covered castle. One day you'll find yourself shut out, and I will be mourning your leaving when I built this wall between us, brick by brick, piece by piece. Then I will talk of myself, think of you and blame us both.

Dichotomy
by me

Some days I could go on forever
With no sleep and wide eyes,
My hands in my hair all night
Long, tugging and twisting,
Braiding strands of red, once
Brown, once purple, once blue,
Once orange, once blond
Hair around my fingers while I
Watch you and hear you, your
Words like sirens in the gloom
Keeping me up and entranced.
Your eyes like signal towers flashing
The way to safety: land here,
Rest here. Everything is ok.

Then there are mornings, sunny
And bright with birds and breeze
Even, perfectly splendid mornings,
When I cannot face anything.
Not even you. That's when your
Voice is an alarm, a condemnation,
And your eyes are spotlights
Shining on everything I've done
Wrong. They offer no comfort.
They do not even see me. Instead
They linger on the failure, the bore,
The one who is never ok.

To the Ghosts I Never Met
by me

There are so many stories of asylums being haunted,
Society's outcasts believed to be as barred
From the afterlife as they were from life
Itself. Is this because our fear of anything different
Perpetuates and follows them or because of the historic
Mistreatment of these people in our quest
To make them well, fully functional members of the society
That didn't want them to begin with? All those women
Trapped in attics so they could rest as they had become
Hysterical and unmanageable when all they really wanted,
All any of us really want, is some freedom, some peace
Of mind, some control. Doesn't it make more sense
That these people would be more at rest,
Welcome death with an open hand and heart, trusting
That nothing could be worse than what they've already
Endured, than everyone else? Perhaps they linger
Searching for revenge on their captors, too mad
To recognize the open door or too angry to forgive?
Maybe it's we who hold them out of our guilt,
Our inability to see yellow wallpaper or danger
Written on the face of a man who condemns
You for wanting a room of your own and to not
Be property? Our desire to set things straight,
To fix them once and for all, keeps them lingering,
Leaving us arcane clues, nothing but faded whispers
Trying to lead us down corridors of the mind we always
Feared to tread but longed to see. They offered themselves
With open hands, everything troubling on their tongues,
In their eyes, and we hid them away so well that now,
When we want their answers, our game of seeking
Takes us looking through abandoned rooms,
Vine invested hallways and shoes no one would wear.

Warrior of Snow Covered World
by me

You want to live someplace where
The snow doesn't win; where it's beaten
Back, handled properly or forgotten about
For long periods of time, a specter, a fairytale
Of the North that only creeps down
Once every few years, the mythical giant
Come for his tithe of slushy roadways,
Closed schools and children making angels
Instead of gold and virgins and goat blood.
This is the way it was like living in the thrumming
Heart of New Orleans, bathed in beads,
Crawfish and spicier everything everywhere.
Snow was for winter, Christmas, when your mother
Boarded you onto the Greyhound to begin the trek
From South to North, the time passing with plastic
Ponies and chicken sandwiches from machines
That revolved and glowed. It was a trip marked
With books read by lamplight until your mother
Made you turn them off so the other passengers
Could sleep without the sight of an eight year old
Girl plowing her way through the forests of Murkwood
With Bilbo Baggins beside her. The trip you recall,
The stops and the food and the trinkets,
Yet the journey from bus station to grandmother's
House looms in your mind as darkness, a hollow
Once full of stage couches and thieves your
Grandfather whispers as the car dips, the trees
Loom, snowy and silent and foreboding; you
Close your eyes, press your head into the shoulder
Of your mother who smells of cigarettes and nerves
And quiet resentment until the hollow is gone.
Thirty seconds, forty five, will never feel that long
Again until you're standing looking at someone
Who never sees you except maybe this time.
Maybe. Not that you know, not that you ask
Because asking is begging and begging is
Weakness and weakness is wrong.

Or if there must be snow, you want
It to be more like college where you lived
On an island of dorms and buildings five,
Six city blocks big. Small enough to walk
To class without crossing the road, get meals
Without leaving or feeling the slip and slide of tires
On ice that make your heart beat as fast
As if reacting to kisses from someone who hears
You sometimes. Even in England, snow was better.
It was heavier, fell once and lingered, the way everything
Good should act. You would trade days of pondering,
Mentally calculating sick time lost and inches
On the roadway, trying to determine safety
Measured against responsibility for sleet
At Hadrian's Wall, your body covered
With soft ice that ran into your clothes,
Your shoes, jacket and gloves. The way you
Sat, after, in a small tea shop drinking
Vanilla currant tea and having a sandwich,
Watching the world cold and hard outside
Knowing there was another bus ride waiting,
One that went back to a manor too cold for your spiced
Blood but full of the warmth of eyes to see, ears
To hear and mouths to defend you. There are
Many ways to defeat the snow, you've found.

I had the weirdest urge while driving to work this morning. I was listening to Five for Fighting's 100 Years on the radio, and I had the urge to just drive. Drive past work, drive out of Salem and just drive wherever I could. To just go. Because I've never done anything remotely like that. I'm not one for spontaneous trips or skipping work or anything like that, but it was so beautiful. I just want to see some things. To be out there and see things. To take a week off or a month off or the rest of my life off and see things. As much as I can. Fill my mind with all the beautiful things and then filter them back out again through words and images and stories and photographs.

There is nothing beautiful in what I do. I think it's that, more than anything else, that is crushing me. The lack of something beautiful, something eternal, something that can be put into words that mean something.