I try not to write too many pity poems, AND I also have noticed what I am feeling, others often are too. I am coming to peace that I may need to write a thousand, here another working out the kinks sharing!
When You Can’t Feel Your Blessings
God, it sucks.
Like this morning, my lover
was a monsoon
(pelting me with offerings)
and yet I needed ever more,
two weeks of rain
for my gutters to be washed clean.
Today I would be a hypocrite to advise.
I cannot tell you to turn on the faucet
and remember there are those who walk
miles to fetch dirty water,
I won’t remind you of flowers or
tell you to take a bath and a cup of tea.
I know these things and yet
the fact that I write in a hotel room
after taking a shower still leaves me hollow,
my mind is the alley next door where beggars
and garbage bags gather.
Sometimes it just bites being in a body,
disappointing bowel movements
and the tendrils of headaches,
people all around you not behaving
the way you would like them to,
the past a cesspool of regret,
worry, like forceps, dragging you
into an unknown future.
I fell today in the shower,
an old lady thing to do.
The front story is friskier-
my effusive amor
playfully smacked my behind
not realizing I was off kilter.
Yes, my footing was bad,
but as I pitched forward
hitting my forearm on the tub’s rim,
a slice of me celebrated the sharp pain.
This is such a metaphor I told him
(he, who has swatted me harder
with never a negative outcome)
I am this close to the edge.
There is a song
that gets stuck in my head,
sung slow and blue-sy
Momma said there’d be days like this,
there’d be days like this my momma said.
I sing it usually when I am feeling alright.
This too shall pass,
is another tome I rub and polish,
again mostly on the good days.
I am in search of the golden reboot,
yearn to (if I must) catch,
then be able to release.
Until then, if you can’t
(yet)
take the hook out of tender flesh,
know you are not the only one
(with great innocence)
who fashions the tightrope, the lasso, the noose.
And please believe this,
if I find the switch,
I will share it on street corners
and please,
any balm, pass it on.