So I heard a poem tonight with an all too familiar ring to it. The kind of thing that could have spilled from my own mouth. Not exactly, but pretty damn close. Immediately after the poet read her last piece for the evening, I jumped up and went to her, squishing past the thrones of students to touch her elbow so she would turn to me. I started in right away:

“Hi, I enjoyed your work immensely. Do you suffer from chronic pain?”

She squints at me, because I’m talking fast and direct. “Pardon me?”

“Do you suffer from chronic pain? I thought that one poem…”

A light appears, she nods. “I get migraines, yeah.”

“That’s what I thought. I’ve had chronic migraines for twenty years…”

And I’m kind of gushing at this point, trying to express how much it meant to hear a poem like that. I admit to her how scared I am to write at length about it, even more petrified to share it with others on a microphone. She nods and seems to understand. I say that much to her and then start to pull away, afraid that I approached her with too much. I just couldn’t hold back my feeling of…relief, I guess? To hear someone say it. To be encouraged and inspired by that. Her poem made my eyes well up, because I do not feel that brave yet, or else I am and I just haven’t found the means(or the time, or the space, or something) to tap into it yet.

I have so many feelings about it. It’s all I could think about on the ride home. It was so nice to hear someone else share perspective on the experience. It isn’t something people really talk about because I think sufferers build themselves to protect it, and there is a weird shame/embarassment involved with being in pain that I can’t even begin to assign words to. Hearing one person’s poem about it on a Tuesday night is not enough, I know that much. I’m glad I could relate, and I’m glad that it moved me and I’m content with my approach to her afterward. But my story and mine, it is still trembling in a weird self-contained casing just under the surface, a raw egg dropped in a pan with the heat still off. Just waiting there slightly shaking. It’s not going to speak itself.

I tried once, at an open mic not too long ago. It was a weird situation. I didn’t feel heard. It’s a two part feeling. One, I do not feel that I expressed it to my full ability. I’m still working on that. Two, I think it wasn’t necessarily an issue of people not listening, but more about me paying more attention to what happened in the air after my sentences. In some way, a way that I cannot explain, I expected the sky to split. I expected the earth to take away my feet. In some tiny weird way, maybe I expected that release to be ultimate. I have to realize that speaking about it isn’t going to absolve me of the illness. It isn’t going to take it away completely. That isn’t the aim, it isn’t the bulls eye. Speaking out is about awareness, wrapping my own head around it, letting other people in when sometimes I’d rather push them away. These are hard things to admit. When all you want is understanding, why would a person aim to be separate, for distance? It’s all a part of grasping how I feel about it. I seek a personal relief, and it doesn’t have to be(and isn’t going to be) grandiose. Maybe in segments and fractions and glimpses, and I’m okay with that. I’m beyond okay with that.

How Near, How Far - …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead

You know times are changing when you glance at a clock telling “1:50am” and you feel every bit your age/that you should’ve been in bed hours upon hours ago but you aren’t. You’re just leaving a poetry gig and feeling good about the fact that 95% of the readers were unfamiliar territory to you, and all inspiring. Sipping a shot of tequila between slugs of coffee, limes on toothpicks. In a word or two, I’m tired. No worries, it’s a good kind. Just received a couple beats in my inbox and I’m going to try to write to at least one of them. The good feeling is: the words never stop. I can be miles and light years and hours and ages away from anything yet here I am, spilling. The usual. The never stop. The what-keeps-me-going.

I dedicated my set to one person tonight, and they do not know it, but I hope they do. By this at least I put the words out there into the atmosphere, for them, nothing attached but heart and hope and support. These are strange days. I aim to make them stranger by pushing a dedication out into the intricate webbing of microphone, hoping that maybe some unspecified wind caught word of it, carried those things past the about-to-bust magnolia tree outside the Hazlett, to the just booming one outside a place in a neighborhood some minutes away. This one is outside a window where someone dear sleeps and works and creates and thinks. Tonight’s work dedicated to that process, and progress. Despite the clock gaining closer to the 1am mark, I read with an extra oomph and fever for that cause tonight.That is all. Going to bed.

off the top of my head, 1:29am

how about steam
and moths?
a flight so wet it leaves
wing spans on the blanket,
crushed antennae tufts(the ends, the ends of your hair),
a nervous kind of landing light,
a walk built to split comas and on you there are
catacombs of freckles where it really counts.

there are highways that leak
we
standing on the knuckle bends of streets
telling it
sailing the streetlight on the backs of heads like halos
hand shadowed asphalts
telling it
the moments that snapped us
it gets easier
you forget to care about anyone actually
listening

Note stacks of books behind precious tuckered kitty. A little spring cleaning magic annnnnd…

voila! On shelves & upright. The headline might read: “Loved Livres, New Home.” Strange not to have them “in” my room, but nice to create space and keep ‘em tidy. Spring cleaning commences this weekend–the clothing swap, the poetry, the tossing of much.

And

I’m tired today.

“the cocktail party”
t.s. eliot

Yes, it’s unfinished;
And nobody likes to be left with a mystery.
But there’s more to it than that. There’s a loss of personality;
Or rather, you’ve lost touch with the person
You thought you were. You no longer feel quite human.
You’re suddenly reduced to the status of an object-
A living object, but no longer a person.
It’s always happening, because one is an object
As well as a person. But we forget about it
As quickly as we can. When you’ve dressed for a party
And are going downstairs, with everything about you
Arranged to support you in the role you have chosen,
Then sometimes, when you come to the bottom step
There is one step more than your feet expected
And you come down with a jolt. Just for a moment
You have the experience of being an object
At the mercy of a malevolent staircase.
Or, take a surgical operation.
In consultation with the doctor and the surgeon,
In going to bed in the nursing home,
In talking to the matron, you are still the subject,
The centre of reality. But, stretched on the table,
You are a piece of furniture in a repair shop
For those who surround you, the masked actors;
All there is of you is your body
And the ‘you’ is withdrawn.
-To what does this lead?

-To finding out
What you really are. What you really feel.
What you really are among other people.
Most of the time we take ourselves for granted,
As we have to, and live on a little knowledge
About ourselves as we were. Who are you now?
You don’t know any more than I do,
But rather less. You are nothing but a set
Of obsolete responses. The one thing to do
Is to do nothing. Wait. (more…)

More than anything, I love the electric singe that occurs right under epidermis–heart to brain to feet to hands. Then words. I can never explain it, nor would I want to. When you are ready to create, you just know. When the words want to come, I just want to let them.

But there is nothing to be done when the urge comes at a time like right *now.* I’m at work; I’m supposed to be doing work things. I’ve been finding time to write during my 9 to 5 for years now, but the fact remains that the act feels stunted due to the environment. I cannot blast my music and get lost. I cannot shut the world out and, at the same time, let the entire thing in. I feel almost a little heart broken because at this instant I’m feeling it, I mean really feeling it. I just want to write. The opportunity will always rise again but to me, the moments are crucial…the instant I feel my veins flare neon–I have to, I must. Draft email templates and Word documents emailed to myself are best friends during the 8 hour work day. I try, I try. Ignore the stapler and binder clips to my left, the stack of filing to my right. I do what I can to get it down. I have to believe that it’s enough.

Sometimes, my college class frustrates me. Like a knee-bouncing, impatient, almost agitated frustration at times. I guess this happens from time to time with any gathering of minds–some things are very, very clear to you and not so clear to others…just as some things won’t quite click for me until I listen to another person suss it out more concisely. Some weeks I really, really feel the age/experience gap between myself and my classmates. This week we were going over assigned poems, so it’s no great surprise to find myself a bit impatient.

Let’s also factor in that I was physically drying out for the duration of class as well. The rain, the rain. All day. This morning I knew I would be riding in–even after looking at the weather page and reading “80% chance of rain…all day, sucker.” In my head I rationalized it this way: Oh, 80% you say? Well it isn’t 100% so take that! *guffaw guffaw yawn guffaw* Soaked. And silly me, I opted to wear the shoes with the smallish hole in the rubber sole–oy vey how do some things slip my mind, I wonder?! So yes, drying out in a classroom. My hair ends and chin dripping when I entered.

Then I get out of class and it seems to be just barely sprinkling…no, wait. You were wrong. Here you go, more driving rain. That’s more like it. Just when I’m dry, I’m wet again. Sigh. Ain’t that the way.

No real point to this. Other than delegating a safe place to say “frustrated.”

Holy canoli what a night! Inspiration exponential. So much great conversation and amazing poetry(as in words that knocked the wind out of me). Oh I want to talk about it but part of me is tempted to just say, “Ask me about it when I’m 60–I need the time til then to fully wrap my head around the movement.” Ay me. Poetry wins again. Sigh.

It’s been a minute since I’ve written something here, aside from the posting of various media mediums and scraps of scribblings(the late night, right before bed kind usually). It isn’t for lack of things to say–quite the opposite, in fact. These days all of my senses are attached to the buds in the trees, the flower stalks pushing up, how the sun feels on bare arms. I’m really into the progression right now. Also, spring cleaning put me in a choke hold recently–I’m diaphragm-deep in notebooks forgotten about, photgraphs, piles of keep or ditch. Abacus is thoroughly enjoying the rapid change of terrain in my bedroom–new things to climb on! New pillars of objects to hide behind!

Poetry tonight, a gig at the New Hazlett on Saturday, class and shows in between. Last night it was sitting shotgun through the North Side, blaring beats and giggling the entire way. Making up food requests for our fictitious “Helen” in the parking lots. Riding the bike, planning a substantial trip home for family birthdays(my sister and my niece share a date). It is simple, but that’s good. I have more to say, but for now this will have to do.