Carrying my truth.
I stand by my views,
watching through
my weakening gaze.

After a raging storm,
making peace with myself,
I vanish into the air,
my convictions fold with me.

Without simple answers,
wearing the new lens,
I see another world:
not clearer,
not wiser,
not safer,
…
just slightly shifted.

A cognitive shift
Seeing the reality.
A state of awe
With transcendent quality.

When hit by the truth -
An overwhelming emotion.
Appreciation of beauty,
Increased sense of connection.

Shift in self-concept,
It could be transformative.
Sense of fragility
From a different perspective.

I sat on the edge of the bed.
You smiled.
I am your daughter,
But words mean to you
Something else.

I took your hand,
Telling you I haven’t slept for a year.
I write reflections,
Tame the voices behind my left ear,
Assemble thoughts about the darkness.

I pour a warm, salty liquid
That burns the skin – it doesn’t moisturize.
It helps me,
This pseudo-therapy.
I hide behind my nickname,
So that no one holds me accountable
For what I’m supposed to be.

You also sat up at night,
You read books.
You carried hidden sadness,
I stick a smile on my lips.

I hug people who carry Egregores.
You and I,
we are not afraid of the night.
Your hand is cold.
You smile,
You put together syllables into strange words.

You know that I matter to you.
I pretend to understand
What you wanted to say.

In a moment, it will get hard.
You’ll start screaming like a little boy,
Or again you’ll wait
Until this state of life passes you.

Life?
It’s a kind of space
Where people, because of fear
Bite and scratch
Like frightened, rabid dogs –
And then soothe it
With controlled tenderness.

I sit with you on the edge of the couch
And I think:
We write with the left hand.
We are beings of the night.
Our path was shared –
In fear, to protect a small piece of “I”.

I fear I’ll lose language.
I desperately defend myself against silence.
I dream of non-human languages.
I write words as if I wanted
To cast spells on reality –
Still, it’s not enough.
The anesthesia stopped working.

One day, this will be the end,
Yet as long as I live,
I’ll be the naive one.
That’s what I want.

I choose sweet, sugar-coated hope,
With pink sprinkles,
Telling myself that he, she
Didn’t mean to trample –
Only life pushed them
Into that dark corridor.

My hope
Is not a soft blanket,
This is a heavy, tight helmet.

The efficiency room days were
the worst and the best.
Broke and bent,
sick and deranged.
Disheveled dreams, like
horses with broken legs.

There was an occasional
miracle.
A forgotten five-dollar
bill crumpled in the
front pocket of some *****
jeans, lying by the fake
plant and a copy of Hamsun's
Hunger, long overdue from
the library.
The fiver would buy a
pint of cheap *****.
My nerves settled for a
moment.

Friends seem to drift
away by the month.

"Where's Johnny?"

"He froze down at the Raccoon River."

"Oh ****, he was always good for a snort."

"Have you seen Sue lately?"

"The cirrhosis finally took her."

"*******, I used to get drunk and
tell her I loved her, while she gave me head."

Poverty and death drank with us in
those cheap rooms,
Singing sad songs and songs
of victory.
Battles were won and lost
and great debates waged in our
addled minds.
We took care of each other the best
we knew how.
Life was just a myth.

I found her in the vapor of a summer dream
She was standing in the door to Paradise
When I asked if I could see her in the sunlight
Her laughter matched the sparkle in her eyes.

Her smile was like a sunlit pond at twilight.
Her eyes resembled sapphires at high noon.
Her hair was like a swirling touch of midnight.
Her voice as sweet as birdsong heard in June.

Her appearance gave me cause to stop and wonder
If who I saw was really standing there
Or was it just my wild imagination
Creating loveliness from smokey Summer air.

I crept a careful step or two towards her
My pulse was pounding madly in my throat
She frowned at me then edged a little backwards-
And suddenly between us was a moat.

There was no bridge or any walkway over.
She was securely on the other side.
It seemed as though she couldn't let me join her
She made that clear no matter what I tried.

I wrote a note of love on parchment paper
And sailed it to her in a little boat
She reached down to fetch it from the water
And read while lumps were forming in my throat

She tucked the folded note into her *****
And wiped a forming teardrop from her eye
She smiled and then she sadly whispered to me
The only word I feared - it was Goodbye.

The moat became a little stream of water
The doorway, two tall Jacaranda trees
The paradise that somehow she had come from
Transformed to smoke, soon taken by the breeze.

And I was left alone to stand and wonder
If everything I’d seen was truly there
Or was this just a middle-aged delusion
Providing me a thrilling tale to share.
ljm