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Jul. 10th, 2023 08:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
greenstormWriting poetry is a tide. It sweeps me up in my own lens onto the world, slightly blue tinted and distorted by the thick curvature of my experience. When I write I have the voice that human communication denies me: shade, nuance, tilt, perspective. My whole life I've lived in the minds of those around me. Every moment is, how are they thinking about this, what motivates them, what do they want, how do they see this? That's how I'm allowed to approach.
Sometimes people have approached me, but rarely. Poetry is where I take my own hands, my own voice, and exist outside of what people want to hear from me. My double vision, always looking at this thing and that thing or rather the relationship between-- always arcing, like a wire that's worn through but not quite enough to go dark.
That is to say I'm sitting here listening to lightning, with fires all around. The lightning isn't showing up on the website in front of me even though sometimes it flashes through the window: its truth is unanchored in the human-made world. It's real and I'm real, but perhaps no one else in the world is. Wind that used to be cool against the heat is a precursor to smoke now, carrying the scent of campfires and evacuation as it fans these literal flames around me.
How am I supposed to put that nuance into human language? It used to be relief. Before that, before my fat protected my core, it was frustrating and made me shiver. Even two weeks ago I was saying how grateful I was there was wind. I'm in metaphor again because how do you talk about that relationship without it? So many things in life are like that, beauty and lightness tinted and then obliterated by new context. Which way the wind is blowing matters now: towards the highway, to shut it down? Towards my house? Or back onto the already-burnt area of the fire so that it may starve and dwindle and lose its power? How do I know which it's doing, to know whether to relax and enjoy the wind?
I felt more like myself the month I wrote poems everyday than at any other time. It faded as I stopped. I enjoy things now: walking the dog in the back field and learning her love language of snuggles and holding, baby ducklings diving into the water as I pour it into their bowl, the weight of my body against the acupuncture mat that lets me relax into it. I wouldn't say I enjoyed poetry. But I thrived on it nonetheless.
Today it's started coming to me again, especially at times when I can't write it down. My mind is waving near-invisible tendrils through my experiences, grasping them and connecting them insistently. Watching firefighters out the back window. The feeling of being rooted so deeply in this land and the way roots tear when you pull them out of the ground and the whole plant is got and it dies, or conversely when the top pops off and the roots are left to grow. Which am I? Offers of help that-- you know, sometimes it's just stage-managing an experience for other people so they feel like they helped, so they won't feel bad and they'll go away. Actual help, well, when the anesthesiologist was putting me under he was gentle, he was taking care of both my body and through his kind explanations of my mind, and I cried and felt like crying was ok in front of someone. I don't cry about the offers of help I've got lately, except maybe one.
Writing this the wind comes up sharply and blows the tin off a roof. It can only be fanning the fire and I don't know what direction it's coming from, I'm inside and it can only spill in through the window. Is it pushing the fire away or bringing it towards me? How can I not write in this? Everything that happens is a sign, is a portent, is an explanation of my own life's map.
Writing. Just writing. To myself?
Of course. There's no one else here.
Sometimes people have approached me, but rarely. Poetry is where I take my own hands, my own voice, and exist outside of what people want to hear from me. My double vision, always looking at this thing and that thing or rather the relationship between-- always arcing, like a wire that's worn through but not quite enough to go dark.
That is to say I'm sitting here listening to lightning, with fires all around. The lightning isn't showing up on the website in front of me even though sometimes it flashes through the window: its truth is unanchored in the human-made world. It's real and I'm real, but perhaps no one else in the world is. Wind that used to be cool against the heat is a precursor to smoke now, carrying the scent of campfires and evacuation as it fans these literal flames around me.
How am I supposed to put that nuance into human language? It used to be relief. Before that, before my fat protected my core, it was frustrating and made me shiver. Even two weeks ago I was saying how grateful I was there was wind. I'm in metaphor again because how do you talk about that relationship without it? So many things in life are like that, beauty and lightness tinted and then obliterated by new context. Which way the wind is blowing matters now: towards the highway, to shut it down? Towards my house? Or back onto the already-burnt area of the fire so that it may starve and dwindle and lose its power? How do I know which it's doing, to know whether to relax and enjoy the wind?
I felt more like myself the month I wrote poems everyday than at any other time. It faded as I stopped. I enjoy things now: walking the dog in the back field and learning her love language of snuggles and holding, baby ducklings diving into the water as I pour it into their bowl, the weight of my body against the acupuncture mat that lets me relax into it. I wouldn't say I enjoyed poetry. But I thrived on it nonetheless.
Today it's started coming to me again, especially at times when I can't write it down. My mind is waving near-invisible tendrils through my experiences, grasping them and connecting them insistently. Watching firefighters out the back window. The feeling of being rooted so deeply in this land and the way roots tear when you pull them out of the ground and the whole plant is got and it dies, or conversely when the top pops off and the roots are left to grow. Which am I? Offers of help that-- you know, sometimes it's just stage-managing an experience for other people so they feel like they helped, so they won't feel bad and they'll go away. Actual help, well, when the anesthesiologist was putting me under he was gentle, he was taking care of both my body and through his kind explanations of my mind, and I cried and felt like crying was ok in front of someone. I don't cry about the offers of help I've got lately, except maybe one.
Writing this the wind comes up sharply and blows the tin off a roof. It can only be fanning the fire and I don't know what direction it's coming from, I'm inside and it can only spill in through the window. Is it pushing the fire away or bringing it towards me? How can I not write in this? Everything that happens is a sign, is a portent, is an explanation of my own life's map.
Writing. Just writing. To myself?
Of course. There's no one else here.
