The Bones: A Poem

I don't usually plan to write a poem. Usually it just comes to me out of the blue. Sometimes I don't even know I have written one until I look back over my journal and there it is. It's almost like I am channeling something greater than me. I am not an actor, only a vessel through which action (the writing of the poem) takes place. It's a little unnerving really since it is almost as if I am not present. I discovered this poem (or half of it) in my journal about a week ago. I loved the raw rough feel of it, the connection to food, the juicy body parts -- and wrote the other half a little more consciously over the past week. It feels true and right -- the distillation of the experience of trying to understand the story of my life, which feels alternately meaningfully huge and silently hidden. Thanks for reading.

The Bones

I’m looking for the meat
For the dark, sour substance of the thing
The juicy bits and morsels that slip
Between the cracks
Get covered in dust
Or rot in the corner

I’m looking for the story
Underneath the story
Looking for the secrets you never whisper
(even in the softest voice)
for the moments you wish you could take back
and the words that echo and slap
my face the moment you utter them

i don’t want to hear the pretty lies
i don’t care about politeness
or the carefully stacked house of cards
i only want truth
a declaration of reality
a single shot at redemption maybe
but always truth

i’m looking for the center of the thing
i want to suck this marrow from the bones
swish the essence in my mouth
swallow and digest
i want to dip the tips in a salty brine
that stops sugar in its tracks
and instantly puckers the lips of your sweetest smile

i want to pry apart your insides
inspect all the parts
dissect your spirit while i hold my breath
i need to see it all
i need to touch every piece
every sorrow, every joy, every pain,
every fear and insecurity
i want them all
laid out and perfectly arranged
on the table while i eat my breakfast

i have to see farther and deeper
peeling away the layers and layers of soft rubbery fat
fatty spirit, fatty soul, fatty body
we must shed this all and stand naked
here in the spotlight
facing each other in a house of mirrors
we have to see everything

i want to cut you down the middle
inspect the heart that beats there
in your chest
touch it, measure it, poke my finger around the insides
i need to understand the way it thumps
the way it swells and shrinks
creating pockets and shadows in between
the folds of skin

i want to touch the stomach and spleen
squeeze the liver to see what you’re made of
taste the ovaries
and gather the testes into my water glass
i want to see you all
pulled apart, like chicken bones
wings sucked dry, emptied of all meaning
in a pile of downy feathers

[maybe then i can begin to move]

i want to sift through the layers
peel back all the skin
hear and see and devour my story
until there’s nothing left but a heap of
meaningless words
a series of images and sounds
that do not even slightly resemble me

in the end i will shit all this
into a freshly dug hole
cover it with leaves
and plant a tree

in the end i will bury the bodies
in the soft brown earth
and plant spring bulbs

i will swallow the sorrow
pour it into the earth,
muster a river that will
smooth the edges of all these bones
carry the feathers to the sea
and rip these anchors from the flesh of my body

i will model this fear after my deepest hurt
shape it into loaves of pain
then look away quickly
as i heave them into the ocean
to dissolve in their salty, rocking tomb

i can’t carry this story any longer
it wants to be compost
to simmer in the sun until it is nothing
but soil, plain old dirt
that will gently cover someone else’s bones
and stories and feathers someday
the meat of the daffodil bulbs and oak tree
will then work relentlessly to break apart those bones
uncover those stories and i will be free

Sick

I have been really sick. Coughing and hacking so violently that my stomach and back muscles are remembering times when hard labor was the way I made my money. It has been two weeks and I have finally decided to give in and go to a doctor. I've tried all the herbs, tinctures, steam baths, hot water bottles, vitamins and anything else I could think of to knock this cough out of my body. Nothing has worked.

I'm going to California in a week to take a permaculture design course north of San Francisco, to visit friends and to get a much needed break from Ohio in winter. I'm really looking forward to all three.

Since I last wrote, I have moved into a little apartment in Athens and have been religiously going through all my stuff and getting rid of excess weight -- emotional and physical. it's been really gratifying to see the trash pile growing as I purge my life of the dead weight of so much stuff. Most of my stuff is just ridiculous -- old articles from my college days, 25 copies of all the papers I wrote for my creative writing workshops, old notebooks -- so much paper! In looking through all this stuff again after many years, I realize that the things I know, I already know. I don't have to save all the pieces of the picture that helped me create the person I am today.

Of all the pieces of paper, I am saving only the words I have written -- papers, journals, the stories I have told myself about who I am, what the world means, where I want to go. I imagine my grandchildren's grandchildren discovering the words someday and piecing together the stories of a life lived. I wish I could find some words written by my great-grandmother Carmella who is said to have killed the man who killed her husband -- stabbing him with a kitchen knife in the back as he ran away. There are also stories of her following her husband to work every day dressed as a man, packing a gun, protecting him from some unknown danger sensed in the streets in turn of the century Dayton, Ohio. What I wouldn't give to hear some stories of her life. The love she felt for her first husband Domenico. Supposedly they both worked in the palace of the Italian king until he was overthrown and they had to leave the country.

Anyway, I have decided to let myself sit with my heart for the next 6 months in Athens. Too much of my life for the past several years has been lived in fear and anxiety -- always worrying about each choice, paralyzed by my opportunities, always trying to fulfill someone else's needs while my own wither away and die. This is a pattern I have known for much of my life, that I felt I was really overcoming 3-4 years ago and which I have fallen back into as a result of family trauma and the complete restructuring of my emotional foundation. Sitting with my heart, I can learn to hear it again, to trust it again. I can remember that it is much more frightening to not follow your heart than it ever could be to follow it.

I never thought I would be here now. I thought I would be beyond all this navel-gazing emotional trauma. I'm not. I'm right here. This is my life. I'm living it in the only way I know how.