The brightest star can shine even with thick black velvet draped over it.
Quartz, lime and salt crystals formed a glass ball.
The dark womb held me, warm and soft.
My mom called my cries when I was born the most sorrowful sound she had ever heard. She said she’d never heard a baby make a sound like that.
I’d open my eyes in low light until the world’s light healed rather than hurt.
The summer before eighth grade, July 1992, I watched a shooting star burn by at 100,000 miles per hour as I stood on the balcony while my family celebrated my birthday inside.
It made it into the earth’s atmosphere
but it didn’t look like it was coming down;
I know it didn’t hit the ground
but it burned something in the time it was here.
The glass ball of my life cracked inside.
Light reflected off the salt crystal cracks.
I saw the beauty of the light within.
Nacre from my shell kept those cracks from getting worse,
a wild pearl as defense mechanism.
In 2001, I quit my job after they melted and poured tar all over my life.
All summer literature class bathtubs filled with rose hip oil cleaned the tar.
That fall logic and epistemology classes spewed black ink all over my philosophy written over ten years then.
Tar turned to asphalt when I met someone from my old job for a drink in November
and it paved a road for my life that went to the hospital I was in that December
where it sealed the roof on my life
when I was almost murdered there
and in February after meeting her for another drink.
They lit a fire at the top of the glacier and pushed the burning pile of black coal off the edge,
burnt red, looking like flames falling into the valley.
While that blazed the side of the cliff something lit an incandescent light.
The electricity from the metal lightbulb ***** went through wires and heated the filament between until it glowed.
I began putting more work into emotional balance from things I learned at AA meetings. In Spring 2003, the damage that the doctors at the hospital in 2001 had done made it harder for light to reflect from the cracks in the glass ball.
I’d been eating healthy and trying to get regular exercise since 1994
but in Spring 2003 I began swimming for an hour every morning .
The water washed the pollution from the burning coals off and then I escaped in July.
I moved to London to study English Language and Linguistics.
I would’ve studied English Language and Literature.
I did well until Spring 2004 when I thought I was being stalked.
I thought I was manic.
I thought I was being stalked.
I went home and didn’t go back for my exams after spring holiday.
Because I felt traumatized and couldn’t write poetry anymore,
I used black ink to write my notes for my book on trauma and the Russian Revolution. I started teaching myself German.
I stayed healthy.
In 2005, my parents went to visit my mom’s family in Malaysia for two weeks.
I thought I was being stalked.
I knew I wasn’t manic.
I thought I was being stalked.
I told my parents when they came home. They thought I was manic.
I showed them the shoe prints in the snow of different sizes from the woods to the windows.
They thought I was manic.
I was outside of my comfort zone.
I moved to California.
I found light.
I made light,
the light reflected off the salt crystals I used to heal the violence inflicted on me from then on.
The light turned the traffic lights to not just green from red but amber and blue.
The light turned the car signals left and right. The light reflected off of salt crystals,
light emitting diodes,
electrical energy turned directly to light, electroluminescence.
The electrical currents flowed through, illuminating.
Alone in the world,
I moved to California in July 2005
but in August I called the person I escaped in 2003,
the sulfur and nitrogen that I hated.
He didn’t think I was manic
but I never said anything.
I never told him why I asked him to move out to California.
When his coal seemed like only pollution,
I asked him to leave.
He threatened me.
I called the authorities.
They left me there.
He laughed.
Then the violence came.
****: stabbed and punched,
my ****** bruised, purple and swollen.
The light barely reflected from the glass ball with cracks— through all the acid rain, smoke and haze.
It would take me half an hour to get my body to do what my mind told it to after.
My dad told me my mom had her cancer removed.
The next day, the coal said if I wanted him to leave he’d leave.
I booked his ticket.
I drove him to the airport.
Black clouds gushed the night before for the first time in months,
the sky clear after the rain.
He was gone and I was free,
melted glass, heated up and poured—
looked like fire,
looked like the Snow Moon in February with Mercury in the morning sky.
I worked through ****.
I worked to overcome trauma.
Electricity between touch and love caused acid rain, smoke, haze, and mercury to light the discharge lamps,
streetlights and parking lot lights.
Then I changed the direction of the light waves.
Like lead glass breaks up the light, lead from the coal, cleaned and replaced by potassium, glass cut clearly,
refracting the light,
electrolytes,
electrical signals lit through my body,
thick black velvet drapes gone.
