Fire on the horizon
Engulfs my little craft
So I turn away
A beacon
Calls from the darkness
But the call comes from rocky shoals
Its light is false
I risked wrecking on the shores of distraction
So turn the boat again
Into the fire
And the true light beyond which set it
In motion
I am still
In stillness
I am empty
In emptiness
I find no peace
Hollow
Haunted
Vacant
Amidst this familiar pandemonium
I alone am solid
Yet invisible
Carrying as passenger
A pain which pays no fare
Answers no questions
Offers no solutions
The me of this moment
None will remember
Not even I
But here
The pain shuffles off
Into the crowd
And I will not remember it either
Detritus and treasures
The flotsam and jetsam
Of mes forgotten
And discarded
Wash ashore
There to be beachcombed
Collected and collated
Discovering the pieces
For a me I can reconstruct
From peak to valley
He tumbled
A pebble
In the tumultuous runoff
Of his own emotions
Finally released
In the awakening spring
After a long, cold winter
Of isolated dissociation
He lay there
For a while
In the rocky bed
His torrent gouged
Through valley floor
Then stood
Shook off pain
Shouldered the burden
Of recovery
So began the work
To break new trail
Back to the peaks
The little window
In the northern wall
Through which the lovely light falls
When the drapes aren’t closed
As water falls
In fractured cascade
See trauma’s pain
Fragmented mesh
Of memory and behavior
Slim tenuous tendrils
Strewn across twin darknesses
Of dissociation and repression
Shattered shards of self
Unanchored and adrift
Sometimes
Life moves at a pace
I cannot keep
Or rather
Life moves
I simply do not
And in my disastrous stillness
The dust storm rolls in
Without hesitation
To Roll
Over
Me
Move or don’t move
Retreat or don’t retreat
Seek cover or…
Let
The dust
Take me
I am having
High-order, ill-mannered thoughts
Inconvenient truths
As the saying goes
Understatement that it is
And I have always
Wondered why
Understatement
Doesn’t have a better word
Overstatement has
Hyperbole
Pointed overstatement
An extraordinary word
Understatement
Seems so…
Well
Understated
But I’m lying
Not about understatement
I cannot overstate it
I cannot be hyperbolic
About understatement or lying
But I digress
I dissociate
Because I am lying
About having these
Thoughts
I’m not having them
I mean that emphatically
Which is also a better word
Than understatement
And still I digress
Dissociate
Dis-associate
Because I also most emphatically
Do not want to have them
So I digress
Again
Diverge
Obsess about other thoughts
Any other thoughts
Or no thoughts at all
Even better
Any activity which annihilates
Thought
Television
Computer games
Hours-long arguments
On social media
Irony
Another great word
A device used properly
Only as a hammer on an anvil
I have arguments
About high-order, ill-mannered thoughts
To avoid thinking about
A particular set of high-order, ill-mannered thoughts
But I digress
From my digression
Which speaks to the power
Of dissociation
I dis-associate
From dissociation
But those thoughts
I don’t want to have
They want to be had
They want to be thought
And they’re knocking at the door
Pounding at it really
Against the big metal door
Protecting my consciousness
Like a hammer on an anvil
Even now
I am buttressing the door
Keeping it shut
As it reverberates
I desperately want
To turn on the telly
Play a game
Or open Facebook
Now I watch my waitress
And I wonder if she is also processing
The traumas of a dimly remembered past
While serving another table’s drink orders
I wonder if the waitress knows
That in the every day of just going along
Her mind, and her heart, and her spirit
Process the hard work that is so upsetting
“You did not go crazy”
“You did not die”
“You lived and never let go of the light
Even when you were plunged into the darkness”
“And all you learned to cope
With the trauma so many years ago
Keeps you alive now
While you heal”
Pix to Words 