Poetry as the Soul’s Self-Diagnosis

“We write to taste life twice,

 in the moment and in retrospect.”

                                 ~Anais Nin

Rumi once wrote:

Sell your cleverness

and buy bewilderment.

I think I know why.

 

Yesterday on the television

a tornado

destroyed everything

in its path

as it meandered

willy-nilly

through Rolling Fork,

Mississippi.

Did you see

how objects

held out

no safety?

 

Inside the hospital

I, too,

am an object

ill at ease

in my body,

illogical in

my dreams.

My mind, its own

round the clock

news on channel 5.

 

Had it been possible

to be this strong

if my heart

had not been broken

in innumerable places;

a smashed clock

thrown against the wall

of youth,

or am I meant

to decipher

the timeless

with my own 

two hands?

 

This nose bleed

would like to

return me

to the sea.

Why keep

my blood

to myself

in so red

a world?

If everything flows

downward

toward

what's left

behind,

then why

all this

clamoring

uphill?

 

When my body

betrays me,

and it will,

I intend to

be my own

medicine.

Either way,

I am best

in small doses,

diluted

by intervals

of silence.

 

Meanwhile,

to the doctors

who misspend

days on end

trying to reconcile

the mystery of

my soul’s reveries,

I leave

this poem

at the edge

of a ruin.

 

03/28/23

 

 

                                                      Painting by Salvadore Dali

Confessions in the Sand

 

Marooned on the island of this moment

I sift through the debris of what came before,

artifacts buffed smooth by a million waves.

 

Here, poems brew like storm clouds on the horizon

despite beginning life in an empty sky, they are

determined to use this beach for their SOS.

 

This shore won’t keep my letters alive for long.

I know because I’ve seen things come and go,

so many true tries and false starts

blown open like pages of a diary in the sand.

 

It is an art making use

of the detritus of the departed.

I fashion a wire coat hanger

into a makeshift antenna

and try to contact the living.

Come in, Mother.

Do you read me?

 

Racked with a survivor’s irony,

I’m reluctant to covet a sole souvenir,

doubting as I do

that anything ever

belonged to me.

 

Island life is not without its pleasures

though joy is a rare sighting,

I cling to my grief because of its buoyancy;

the only logical response

to all I’ve left behind.

 

Dreams are now my source of travel.

Every dream is a foreign country, and

it’s true, they do things differently there.

 

I've learned to speak a language

made of rubble, shards of sea glass

and desire strewn like broken bric-a-brac

longing to be reborn

and take up life anew.

 

This moment’s island culture

is a microcosm

where prayer is still

preferable to sleep.

 

Will I ever get out of here?

Where else is there to go?

I will have to work to wake.

 

And so, I’m doing my pushups

on the beach until it hurts.

This is how I’m making

myself stronger.

 

I say a man’s sorrow

can move mountains

because the heart

is a muscle

that needs to ache

or better yet break

before it's made able.

 

03/03/23