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Tom Atkins Dec 2020
Outside it is snowing, just a bit.
Twelve years in and it still seems odd
Vermont, cold and with its ethereal light
feels more like home than the hills and mountains
you spent your first 54 years immersed in.

It seems odd that you were nearly sixty
before rediscovering the ocean,
Maine and Cape Cod, wild, often rugged,
nothing like the sprawling sands
where you were raised. And yet, it is these seas,
not the seas of your first half century
that calm your soul and raise it
from it’s gloom.

It seems odd that the place
that sings its siren song,
calls to you, makes you yearn like a lovesick boy,
lies in a foreign land,
with a foreign language,
nothing familiar, nothing, and yet
the first time you arrived,
sitting in Saint Mark’s square,
cappuccino in hand,
the Adriatic light and salt water filling your senses
you felt more at home
than you have ever felt in your long fractured life.

It seems odd, that you are so in love
with a woman so different than the southern sirens
that surrounded you most of your life.
Darker. More direct. Challenging, yet gentle,
Struggling strong, real.
She enflames you. She calms you.
She protects you. Even from yourself.
You have never known a woman like her.
And yet, in her arms, you feel that most unusual of things,
safe.

It seems odd that at this age, you look at the places
you called home, and the places you feel home,
that make your soul feel whole, complete, possible,
and you question so much of the place and time
and people who raised you.
But only for a few moments
before realizing home has never changed.
Truth has never changed.
You have.
I often spend a lot of the week between Christmas and New Year's reflecting. These thoughts arose after looking at pictures from a few years back to use with this poem for my blog. One showed up from Venice and the poem fairly spilled out.
Tom Atkins Apr 2020
The sanctuary is empty, cleared by fear
that has sent us each into our temples
seeking solace and safety.

The holy elements gather dust that shows
in the sun that pours through the stained glass windows.
The ***** is silent.

It is not the only place. Temples are empty.
Mosques are empty. The vast caverns
of the mega churches are empty.

Still, you come. A solitary pilgrim.
You sit in a back pew and pray.

It is hard, praying at such a time.
There is too much, too many, you are overwhelmed
by the vastness of loss and pain and fears.
There are too many to be grateful for,
too many helpers, too many blessings that remain.
You are fine until you begin to pray,
and then suddenly, you feel small.  Overwhelmed.
Your helplessness in the vast world of need
seems infinite.

And so, your prayers lack words,
They are what the bible calls, “a prayer of moaning”.
And that is enough. It has to be. It is all you have to offer.

In the day to day, you are fine.
There are dishes to wash. Poems to write.
The cats need to be fed.
Books to be read.
You can pretend it is normal, until you bend your head
and call on your God.

But then, that is why we pray, is it not?
Because we understand this is beyond us.
It always was, but suddenly our weakness has become real.
We can no longer pretend that we hold the answers,
that we have the strength, that we are enough.

We are not.

Perhaps that is not entirely true.
We are indeed enough.
We are enough to be loved.
We are all we were made to be,
but not all we aspire to be, never content
to be merely human,
we want to be more,
to pretend we are God,
when in the end we are children playing at it,
suddenly overwhelmed and frightened
when things go wrong, looking to our father to save us
when our humanness proves its limits.

You pray in the stained glass light.
There is wind outside and the bones of the church moan with you.
The building creaks, as if God is restless.
When you are done, you leave.
You go back to your home, a different kind of sanctuary now.

The cats greet you at the door.
The woman you love hugs you as you hang your coat.
This is your sanctuary now.
Here you can pray more coherently,
for the neighbors, for the farmers at the edge of town,
for the children next door playing basketball in the afternoon sun.
You feel more sane here. Less overwhelmed,
able to far better accept what you can and cannot be.
There are things you can do here. Now. Small things,
but, as you always say, they add up.

You sip coffee. You make a call. You write a card.
You prepare for the next days work.
God is with you. You believe this.
It allows you to do, when there is not enough of you,
a power beyond your own.

If there is greatness to be had, .
if there is humbleness, this is where it lies,
in knowing what you are and are not,
and living in faith that there is more,
both in the world, and in you,
than you can see,
that your truest sanctuary has no walls
to hold God in,
or let him out.
I am a part-time Methodist pastor. I was working on my sermon this morning and this is what came out instead.
Tom Atkins Oct 2020
Sometimes
the biggest step forward
is a step back,

to find the place
you left the path,
following someone else’s journey
instead of your own.
I was about 14. I was on a hike with a large group of Boy Scouts. We came to a fork in path. It wasn’t marked clearly, so we picked one, and off we went. A couple of hours later, it became clear to some of us that we were on the wrong path.

A few of us went back, to cat calls and ridicule, found the fork and went the other way. The bulk of the group stayed the course and went forward. It turned out our little band was right. We had a glorious hike, great views, and came back to the parking lot at the bottom of the mountain at the time we expected to.

Five hours later the other group wandered in, bedraggled, tired, having walked and wandered all over the place, with no views and finally having to use their compasses and cutting across the mountainside without a path to get back to us.

It is a lesson I have carried and had to apply several times in life.

Sometimes we have to go backwards to go forward. And there is no shame in that.

Tom
Tom Atkins Jul 2021
It is a constant temptation,
to get in the boat that brought you
and row again, not home
but to the river, to the sea,
to take this vessel, small as it is
and take it to places it was not created for,
foreign places with baroque towers
and ancient marbles, strange trees
and words you can not understand,
but left there long enough, will.

A Constant Temptation

It is a constant temptation,
to get in the boat that brought you
and row again, not home
but to the river, to the sea,
to take this vessel, small as it is
and take it to places it was not created for,
foreign places with baroque towers
and ancient marbles, strange trees
and words you can not understand,
but left there long enough, will.
About this poem.

A touch of wanderlust in a rainy day. The picture  I used on my blog was taken in Cornwall England, where my son and I had rowed to a small island to explore, as children will.

Tom

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Tom Atkins Feb 2021
It is a strange thing, brass, half compass, half sextant.
No one in the antique shop knows exactly what it is.
A fascination, surely an instrument of navigation,
it belongs on the deck of wooden ships,
not here in the byways of a small town in a small state.

It has made its own journey, certainly.
Was it stolen, lost, moved?
Did it come here of its own intention,
or is it the debris of a life come undone?
Your mind is full of questions
and there is no one to answer.

You sigh. Its polished brass curves sing to you
and it is a sad song, a mournful song of lostness,
of too much time spent floundering in a sea
far more kind than you deserved, for you survived
as you were cast from wave to wave,
from foreign land to foreign land, and in the end

it was grace that brought you here, not navigation.
Time and currents and wind, conspired to bring you home
when you could not find the way yourself.
About this poem

Life’s been good to me, even when it wasn’t. God’s been good to me, even when I wasn’t. In the past couple of years in particular, I have drifted more than I like. And yet, here I am, at home with myself and healthy again, mind (mostly) and body and spirit (mostly).

Faith will lead us home. Not directly perhaps. But home nonetheless.

Be well. Travel wisely,

Tom
Tom Atkins Dec 2020
I have become stronger
in my weakness.

I do not even pretend
to understand.

Some gifts,
you just accept.
Tom Atkins Apr 2020
Life has become closer, more precious,
bound by walls and doors and masks
and an unfamiliar fear.

This is not who you are.
But it is, right now.
Something weaker than you want to admit,
far more vulnerable,
your breathing labored and wheezy,
unsure. Each moment, each breath
both work and a celebration.

You remember your father like this,
his smoke ravaged lungs straining each breath
for the last years of his life,
no medicine,
no mechanics able to do more than making the next possible.
I watched the wearing away,
of body and mind, and will.

This will pass. Already the medicines are at work.
Already your wheeze has died down to a whisper.
You will heal. Doors will open.
Horizons will return,
and you will walk them, staring into the dusky sky
unafraid of death,
thankful you have been spared for a time,
the gratitude itself a kind of horizon,
a way of seeing past your vulnerability,
finding again the horizons once lost,
and finally, reclaiming each and every one.
My father had COPD the last many years of his life. It was terrible for him in the last years.

I’ve been battling a lung issue for the past few weeks. At this point, I am on steroids to beat back the resultant inflammation in my lungs. It’s been a slow journey, but I am on the upswing finally. Not contagious at all, but very tiring. Not being able to breathe well leaves you with a sense of vulnerability.

I was supposed to be at Cape Cod this month for just a few days. I miss the ocean and the emptiness of the offseason there. Nothing brings me back to myself like hours on an empty beach.

I am actually doing fine during this quarantine. But I an as tired of it as anyone.
Tom Atkins Jan 2020
Spanish moss hangs from the Live Oak,
a slow, beautiful murderer in the big city,
redolent of memories, blue music and smokey rooms,
drag queens crooning, a fight or two
late in the night while you sipped bourbon,
content in the corner,
listening less to the music than an internal dialogue,
devils and angels in your head
dancing a tattoo, making sultry peace with each other
as you scanned the crowd, seeking a distraction
as you courted oblivion at the stroke of midnight.

You sigh,
there is no glory in the memories. Life lived
and long ago discarded, without regrets
and without longing, happier to be in the light,
but parts of you were shaped by dark nights,
bluesy music and the grind of tinder before tinder,
a fire that never took in you,
a dead man in a plaid shirt in the corner of the bar
who somehow left more alive than he arrived.
There’s old times blues playing at my favorite diner. That’s what inspired this poem that is only partially autobiographical.

I do love old smoky blues bars. There are fewer of them here in Vermont than in the south where I lived most of my life. I lose myself in the music and atmosphere.

I am rarely happy with my poems. This one, I am happy with.
Tom Atkins Feb 2020
It is a room of chairs.
Their thin spindles let the light through,
visually almost invisible,
easy to move about the room,
to reconfigure as people come and go,
with no sense of mass or weight,
always room for one more, one less,
a different sort of life,
one that allows for constant change,
ebb and flow,
never too much,
never too little,
a shape-shifting goldilocks kind of room.

You feel strangely at home here,
an older version of Alice in Wonderland,
never quite yourself,
never quite what others expect,
never quite fitting in,
at least not in the way you expected.
The world has not made room for you.
You are tolerated
as long as you re-arrange your furniture
in the proper way
in the proper time.

Your eyes soak in the room,
so airy and bright,
and settle into a chair.
There is no one here but you
and the woman you love,
and it matters not where the chairs are
as long as there are two together.
On my poetry blog, this poem is illustrated by a photograph taken at the Thomas Nelson House in Yorktown, Virginia, I love the colonial simplicity of the room, the lightness, and easy reconfiguration a room full of chairs offers. The fact that they are Windsor chairs, one of my passions, makes it even more wonderful.

My wife and I were talking this morning. We had company last night and ended up going to bed without the broad stretch of time talking that is part of our day to day life. We both felt the loss of that time, a disconnectedness that is uncommon to us and to our relationship.

From those two things, this poem.
Tom Atkins Jan 2021
Mostly, I preach to my self. Talk to myself.
I write what I need to to hear. Self talk,
out loud. So often painting colors
like emotions, spilling out,
water from a dam overrun by storms I cannot name
in the normal scheme of things.

I sit with them, the storms,
longer than more sensible people.
I get wet. Disheveled.
The wind blows me like a scarecrow in July.
I sit with them. Madman in the rain.
But how else do I know if it is a storm
or a shower?
Regular readers of my blogs know I process feelings slowly.  

Yes, I really do talk to myself. Yes, I am also a painter.

I don't mind getting wet.
Tom Atkins Jul 2020
Some things you just sit on.
You let the anger flame high and bright,
but you wait, lest the fire consume you
as it has done so often in the past.

In the configuration you have learned the power of silence,
how it protects you from the worst of yourself,
how it prevents flammable words
that burn everyone they touch.
Deserved or not, you have lived as anger’s roadkill
too often.
You will forever bear the scars,
and the silence is your protection,

Silence is also the enemy. It isolates. It does nothing.
There is no healing in it. Left in place too often
it becomes a weapon.

Somewhere in between it the simmering.
A righteous anger of promises unkept,
lies more common than truth, faith
abandoned in the name of fear and someone to blame.

How is it we are still fighting these battles?
How is it that we, a nation capable of the impossible
cannot heal the rifts and illnesses of spirit
to live up to the promises we declare
on our holidays and sacred places?

I cannot quench this anger. No longer.
There is work to do and even unsure what it is and how,
the simmer burns. Even with the wet balm of time,
the simmer burns.

As you have aged, you have slowly lost your fear of fire.
It still lives but you have learned you will survive it,
that despite what your emotions tell you,
you will not be consumed.

So bring on the fire.
This can no longer be a thing that flashes
and is forgotten.
Let it burn, and I will burn with it,
light in the night, living with an aggressive love
that too many will hate.

Selah
I was accosted this morning in the diner where I eat now and then. I was speaking to one of the patrons about the state of race relations and the man at the next table took offense. It was a tense few moments. I ended up quoting scripture, something I almost never do except in my capacity as a part-time pastor. I find it often inflames people who are not steeped in the gospels and who feel the use of the bible is self-righteous, so I don’t use it in arguments. But this time, I did.

It shut him up and he stomped out.

It’s not the first time this has happened to me. Once, a few years ago, I caught hell in another diner for being “That gay-loving pastor.” It seems I was an abomination. Scared the pants off of me. But I survived.

What I learned from it this time around is that I am tired of the hate in this country. I am tired of having lived 65 years and seeing us fight the same battles over something as simple as caring for the people who surround us. From the handling of the pandemic to race relations, we seem to have abandoned the most simple premises of our faiths – all of which are built on care for each other. No exceptions.

It was a screaming anger a month ago, just after George FLoyd’s ******. Now it is simmering anger, close to the surface, and it seems as if it is not going away.

I don’t know what to do with this anger. But I will figure it out. Anger can be a good fuel and not sim
ply destructive. I learned that late in life and I am still learning. Let it simmer, I tell myself. Let it simmer.

Something will come of it.

Tom
Tom Atkins May 2020
It has been a year since you visited the city.
walked its streets with its crowds of infinite variety,
an anonymous soul elbow to elbow with strangers,
Faces and fashion and more than that, an energy
so unlike your sanctuary in far away Vermont.

You need this, every so often. It feeds you,
a reminder of the power of mass and masses,
your mind awash with the vast mix of America
all gathered in one place, dreams, and nightmares
and side hustles, a place of promise and fear,
everyone going somewhere, doing, reaching,
faces animated. There is purpose here, urgency,

a reminder

of what you fled, and why you come back,
grateful for your place of peace, but aware
that too much peace and you fall into rot,
that yours is a life barely in balance, a needful life,
needful less of things than places, experiences,
the soul of places and people unlike yourself.
like salt in the stew, it flavors you, always in danger
of too much or too little.

Here is the Hassidic Jew in his worn black coat and hat.
Here is the Puerto Rican girl, bright and loud.
Here are the suits,
the old Italian woman pulling her cart of groceries,
the tourists, the hustlers and homeless,
the old Russian men playing chess in the park,
The Arabs gathered for their thick black coffee,
Here are the hayseeds and vagabonds like me,
passing through, thieves of energy that no one misses.
There is more than enough to go around.

Here are carts of food and Gucci knock offs.
Of diners just outside theatres. Hotels
for the rich and poor sit side by side.
Crowds outside Penn Station, steady streams
rise and fall in and out of subway stations.
Water towers and gardens on the roofs.
Carts of clothes on racks roll by you as you walk.
Here are all the things you are not,
somehow becoming you. You should be lost here
but you never are, It feels like home. Not a place of peace,
but a place of constant becoming.
You smile when you are there, even if you leave exhausted.

It is your pilgrimage, Once, twice a year,
But not this year.
TH=he city has grown dark and dangerous.
Time Square is still full of billboards and video screens
and hardly a soul to see them.
We are warned away in this plague year,
the power of the place gone inside, waiting out death,
and you mourn the lost,
and you wonder,
when you can return, and how, and what will be left
for strangers like me.
I love New York City, and watching what they have gone through and are still going through, has been heartbreaking,
Tom Atkins Dec 2020
It is raining. A January rain come early
on the cusp of a new year. Cold,
but not cold enough for snow.
Everything is mud.

It has not been the year you wished for.
So much ground to a stop, to a broken crawl.
A year dedicated to survival and fighting
of new fears. A lost year.

Children have grown up without you seeing them.
Friends have died, alone. The church lies empty.
There have been no journeys,
too few explorations.

Too much of your time this year has been spent in mourning
and you are tired. Plague, Cancer
and the worst cancer of all, isolation,
have left your mind muddled, and yet….

And yet… it has not been a wasted year.
Around you, you have seen a shift. an appreciation
of true value, of each other, of the precious things that matter
and the things that do not.

You have remained in love.
Your faith has grown stronger as your body has grown weaker.
Your demons are more polite. At times, the battles
turn to afternoon tea and crumpets.

“This too shall pass” has become our mantra,
and it is beginning. You can just see it, the light, the hope.
It is a vague thing. Vague as mud. But it is there,
snippets and shots and whispers.

It is as if we have been asleep, in a bad dream,
and we wake to the same dream, foggy and cold.
Vague. Uncertain.
The ground is slippery.

But it is the cusp of the new year.
The days grow longer. There is change in the air,
sweet as lilac in the night. A thing you cannot see
but you know is there.

And you, tired and worn, are piling the wood.
It is time for a bonfire. For warmth.
To become a beacon, calling the lost home,
including yourself.
As I prepared to write in my daily blog, I had things to say and could decide whether to say them in poetry or prose. Prose would have been easier, poetry more memorable.

Poetry it is.

Tom
Tom Atkins Aug 2020
A single door in the brick building.
A host of windows to let in light.
A place to live and worship and work,
all three, your soul built in red clay, wood and glass.

A place to look out. To see the light,
the green of gardens, the crowds at a distance.
birds, at least until winter,
to revel in the sun, the heat of it

without going out.

A place for others to peer in,
curious wanderers, strangers,
the invited and uninvited,
It is the price and privilege of so much glass

that they can see you in sacred times
and the profane, that layer by layer
your secrets are revealed,
your scars and sins as bright as the curtains that waft in the wind.

A place to prepare. To see what is out there,
The ugly and the beautiful, A place to pretend
you can choose which to live among.
You cannot.

It is all real, and with you or without you,
the things beyond your doors will go one.
You can stay, here behind you thick walls,
or go out and plant, choose what you will get to eat

at the end of the season.
I think I won’t tell you what this one is about in my own mind. There are too many layers in this one. I hope it works.

If it does, whatever you think it is about, is probably right.

Tom
Tom Atkins Feb 2020
Words matter.
Your mother taught you this
when you were a boy.

She lived it, taught it. It sank in,
a vital part of who and what
you would become.

Words create feelings.
They heal. They wound.
They inspire, inform, sell,

They should be
things of truth.

You think on this on the long drive home.
The GPS has changed its mind once again
and you are on a new road with new thoughts.

It is dark, late at night. Here and there,
lights twinkle. Cabins and houses in the forests.
You can smell the wood smoke.

Yes, it is February. And there is snow
and ice on the road.
You drive, as you generally do, too fast.

But it is warm outside. Over 40.
and the ice melts. You feel it give way
as you press the accelerator around the curve.

It is nearly spring. Oh yes, there will be more snow,
but you are aware of the change.
There is something new in the wind.

You sense, more than see, the bulbs stir.
It is time to change colors,
to let go of the greys and ***** whites

that are so familiar, but not quite true any longer.
You need a new vocabulary, a thing of color and sun,
the truth of you.

You have become too familiar with dark words.
They filled so much of your past
that they had become your mother tongue.

But you do not live there any longer.
To speak the truth, you must learn new words
to tell it.

You have always been bad at languages.
Words came hard. They still do.
You barely passed French in high school, college, grad school.

It is your nemesis.

But when you live in a place, you must learn
the new land’s words. To speak them
as if they were your own.

And so you struggle with this vocabulary of joy,
to tell your truth in words that feel odd
spilling out of your mouth and pen.

You must let go
your mother tongue.
The truth insists on it.

There are new paintings to create,
bright things, the colors of childhood,
a reclaiming of innocence,

and it awaits you at the end of the road,
in the place where your love lives.
You press the pedal.

The car moves faster through the night.
My life is good right now. I don’t reflect that enough in my poetry. Part of that, I think is that I tend to write in the morning when my depression is at its strongest, and I have used my poetry to expunge that demon. Part of it too, is that I have become familiar with the vocabulary of pain. I’ve used it a long time. The words come easily.

But it is not really my truth. My truth is that life is good. I am as happy as I have been in many, many, many years.

It is time to find my own vocabulary of joy. It will take a while. But, as the poem said, as my mother taught me, words matter. It’s time to find some new ones. It may not come easily, but it will come. Because I am a persistent kind of guy, not because of innate skill.
Tom Atkins Feb 2020
You cannot find it
on the most recent maps.
Once you could.
A tiny dot in small print.
But not any longer.
It is too small.
In the middle of nowhere,
a confluence of four farms,
two roads,
an ancient Methodist church
and a country store turned museum.
If you happen to be there,
there is a sign.
Just one,
To announce your arrival and departure,
all in a blink. The sort of place
we make fun of,
or worse,
miss altogether.

And yet, people live here.
No fewer than they did in the day
when they rated a dot on the map in four-point type.
They are born here,
Grow up and age here.
Die here.
There is drama. Love is discovered
and lost.
Faith is found and lost.
They suffer, no fewer and no more
than a generation ago.

Your grandfather lived
on one of the four corner farms.
Your father was born here
and lay in the small oak crib
that now lives in your upstairs bedroom.
Your house, in fact, is a museum of sorts,
artifacts of generations scattered about,
proof that this place exists
not just in geography
but in soul.
About this poem.

I live in a little village called West Pawlet, Vermont. When I first moved here. It’s small. Including the farmers on the fringes, maybe 300 people according to the last census. When I first moved here, I used to think of it lovingly as “Nowhere, Vermont.” I often thought you could write a series of sketches, Lake Woebegon-like, about the area and the people.

Even though I worked most of my career in big cities, places like this have alway sung to me. I suspect it is because of the time I spent on my grandfather’s farm in Carsley, Virginia. I loved that time. I love that place. My great aunt, my father’s sister, still lives in my Grandfather’s house.

We forget such places. They get lost in headlines and the business of life. But they too are part of life. A place like Carsley, or here in West Pawlet, only looks bucolic. In reality, every challenge and vice and struggle of the big cities lives here as well, just without the resources to help them, because they are, after all, invisible.

Except to those of us who live here.
Tom Atkins Feb 2020
You shift in the bed. Light comes through the windows.
There are birds singing outside,
too early for spring, but singing nonetheless.

A full night’s sleep and you are still tired.
Your bones and soul both resist inertia.
The warmth, yours and hers, comingle.

Nearly three years since you exchanged vows.
None of them easy. None of them the stuff of fairy tales.
Times of death and loss and struggle,

Constant chaos.

You prefer peace. That is the truth of it.
it has been a long journey to capture it.
an old man’s journey to rebuild himself from the rubble.

She shifts slightly and settles back into her deep sleep.
You would prefer the fairy tale, but you have lived too long
to believe in them.

In its place is what you have, a different kind of love,
soft as flesh, strong as steel, A thing you wish
you had found as a young man.

But age has its value. Age is a treasure,
Wisdom, however it comes, is treasure. You smile, fully awake,
reaching your arm over the covers

and drawing her closer still.
The woman I love and I have a third anniversary coming up in a couple of months. I still live in amazement in us.
Tom Atkins Jun 2020
You breathe in. Deeply. Slowly.
The air here is still pure.
You can smell the forests.
You can smell the mock orange in the garden,
successor to the lilacs, now faded and brown.

You breathe out. Slowly, with purpose.
Spittles of poison leave you.
The anger. The fear. The uncertainty.
A part of you relaxes. Not enough,
but a start.

You breathe in. Deeply. Slowly.
There is peace in the Vermont air.
This is why you came, though you did not know it at the time.
For the peace. Unable to find your own,
you came to a place where peace is the natural state,
a place where you could breathe it in
with each swelling of your lungs.

You breathe out, slowly, with purpose.
This is what you have learned,
violence in anything, even breath,
is a form of ******. Of spirit, Of your spirit at least.
You have seen enough of it in your lifetime,
and your tolerance is low. The pain and the anger
always lies near the surface. It is an act of will
to keep it at bay.

You breathe in. Slowly. Deeply.
The mountain air fills you.
“I look to the mountains from whence cometh my help”
declares the Psalmist and you breathe his words,
knowing your only real power comes in love,
in peace, no matter the world’s penchant for anger.
You refuse to make that anger your own, and so
you breathe in the morning peace
as you clutch the cross around your neck.

You breathe out. slowly, with purpose.
This time, this breathing, is a girding of arms,
for the anger still lives beneath the surface,
and you will never **** it. It has a life beyond your own.
Your own pain and experiences will never leave you.
No amount of breathing will expel it,
so the trick is to breathe it out, just enough
that it can become a thing controlled,
put to work, harnessed by love, power
to wrestle the darkness around you.

You breathe in. Slowly. Deeply.
Unsure of the battle, but sure of the cause,
sure of the value of every soul you encounter,
even those who weld their swords seeking
submission and blood, blended by their own anger,
unfamiliar with history and gospel. You breathe in strength,
the power of sunshine over the quarry.
You breath in the words of your youth
and they become sinew and muscle.
God in you. finally. Again.

You breathe out, slowly, with purpose.
You need this renewal. Every day you need it.
and that is in ordinary times. Today
you need it more. Your weakness,
your easy anger is not a thing to be purged,
only a thing to be controlled. There is work to be done
and work needs its fuel, it’s passion,
a flame fed, but not too much. You breathe more of it out,
feeling your soul calm, knowing when to stop,
in that place between peace and war inside yourself
where change without carnage becomes possible.
The times, the poor handling of the coronavirus and the flames fueled by Geroge Floyd’s ******, the politics of diminishment and anger, have pushed my peaceful, non-political nature past its comfort zone. A latent anger has risen in me, as it has in many of us.

But this is what I know. I do not do well when I live in anger. I lash out. I don’t think clearly. I forget who I am in the red mist and people get hurt. It can become something I do not control well and nothing good comes of that.

Good only comes in love. Historically. Relationally. In every way imaginable, love is the answer.

But a little anger? Enough that we are spurred to action, to take our gifts and put them to work for good? That may just be a good thing.

Tom

PS: The picture is of the backside of the cross I wear around my neck. It was given to me at time, a decade and a half ago, when I was hurting and angry both. And I was afraid, lost, unsure. The scripture comes from the book of Joshua, chapter 1, verse 9:  “Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.”  That has been one of my mantras since then. But a little meditation, breathing out the harmful and breathing in the good, has been part of the process.
Tom Atkins Feb 2020
Ash Wednesday, and then it is Lent,
a season of sacrifice,
a reminder of Christ's own sacrifice 40 days hence.

The ashes have been wiped away
and the season begun,
barely noticed by some, for others,
it is at the heart of faith itself.

Your forehead is fresh and clean,
and your decisions made.
It is time to release the darkness,
to dance in the night,

and let your demons dance with you
before tossing them to the sky like dark balloons
for someone else to discover
after they are deflated.

Howl with the coyotes. Sing with the just arrived robins.
Wallow in the almost warm sun with the cats.
They know. Lent, for all its dour reputation,
is the almost spring, and worth celebrating.
I've always seen Lent differently. And since Lent is a church-made thing, not a biblical thing, I feel comfortable with my choice.
Tom Atkins May 2020
A storm blows in from the east. You can smell the rain.

In an hour or less, it will be here
and unpredictability will reign. The seas will roil
and flotsam, so well hidden by the water
will be tossed on the beach like ragdolls.
And the driftwood around you, dry
from yesterday’s sun, will drift once again.
The landscape will change.

It has been a season of storms,
the kind of storms that rattle windows
and leaves behind damage, ripping at roofs,
tearing away foundations, unrelenting, terrible storms,
one after another. You have survived them all,
but just barely, your faith and those you love,
have not let you flail for more than a moment,
when the winds were at their worst.
Your landscape has changed. And changed again.

The earth is a solid thing, so they say, but
that has not been your experience.
It is a wild thing, uncontrollable, a raging mix
of beauty and betrayal, a seething sea of madness,
waiting for the next wave, the next gust of wind
to tear at you and test you and see
whether you hold fast or fall, A test
of your ability to not walk, but dance on the water.
In the New Testament of the Christian Bible, there is a story of Peter, one of Jesus’ disciples, who in order to prove his faith, stepped into the raging seas and show that his faith was so strong that like Christ, he could cross the surface of the water. He took one step, and his faith failed him and Christ had to reach out and save him from drowning. Some people see that episode as a failure, but I have always felt it was a raging success. He walked on water! Even if only for a moment.

The original title of this poem was to be “The Lost Year”, referring to the year of sickness and struggle I have fought through, with the added time of quarantine and coronavirus we have all been through. Most of the plans I had for the year are lost. It was to be a lament.

But if there is one thing I have learned in forty years of writing poems, it is that the muse often has other ideas, and it turned into a poem of gratitude for a faith and people who have loved me through this year. I may not be dancing on water yet, but I have come close.

Be well. Travel wisely,

Tom
Tom Atkins Jun 2020
Early in the morning, I breathe you in.
The energy of your skin fills me.
And I wake before I wake,
Every nerve awake,
my once dead heart beating,
wild and alive.
A love poem. What else?
Tom Atkins Oct 2020
Dust on the Clocks

Three clocks stand on the mantle.
Four generations of time keepers
stand still.

The mantle clock with it’s graceful wooden arch
reminiscent of cathedrals, complete
with hand painted dial and brass pendulum
belonged to your great grandparents,
one of two things in your home
that came from the plantation they once owned
before the civil war swept through
and began their long, slow decline.
It chimed the hour when you were growing up,
it’s strand spring driven mechanism
sonorous when it rang, and yet somehow
almost tinny.

There is another, from your grandfather’s house.
Faux marble, a bit too bright and gaudy for it’s time,
a tiny arched gravestone, you wind it
and the clock ticks annoyingly, steadily,
never quite keeping perfect time.
According to your grandfather, it never did,
It came from a world’s fair, he once told you,
one of only a couple trips he made
that took him far from his little farm villiage,
His wanderlust never quite fit in there,
and though rarely fed, it was a memory worth having
despite the clock’s being terrible at its job.

The last clock is small. A tilted block. More recent.
A gift you brought back to your parents
from your first trip overseas. A thank you
for feeding your own wanderlust early,
of making you a traveler and wanderer,
willing to be uncomfortable in another’s world for a time
in exchange for the growth each journey brings.
It sat on the desk in their den
until the day the last of them died,
before coming back to you, this small reminder
silent with its electric motor. Almost invisible
except for the mark it left on your soul.

The clocks have dust on them.
You are not the best housekeeper
and time means less to you now than it once did.
Painfully you have learned the lesson
of deadlines and plans destroyed again and again.
There is only now. Here. This moment.
The rest is illusion. A beautiful construction,
artful as the clocks. Full of memories.
Full of promise. And nothing more.
have always been told that I have a difference sense of time than the rest of the world. Maybe that is true, one of the lessons of a life of interruptions and errors. I can keep a deadline with the best of them, but that is not where I live. I live in the now. I’ve had enough of life blow up on me, and enough of life provide me with glorious surprises, to know that’s about all we can count on.

On my blog, there is a picture of three clocks that accompany this poem. The clocks in the picture are in my office at home. The stories in the poem are true.

Tom
Tom Atkins Oct 2020
Empty and Armed.

Early in the morning and you walk in the sand.
Near the shore it undulates, God’s art,
renewed each morning at the whim of weather and tides.

You walk in the sand. Your foot prints leave divots.
Water seeps in. Tiny ***** scurry, almost invisible.
If you look carefully, you can see their tracks
before they disappear into their tiny burrows.

You walk. The waves whisper. It is a quiet morning.
No one else is on the beach.
Just you, your God and your demons.

The demons disperse like dandelion seeds,
unable to hold on in the vast emptiness.
They become as lost as you once were.
lost in the horizon, their claws rendered useless

as you ignore them.

You become lost too. Lost in the wash of the waves.
In the long stretches of sand, in the place you walk
beyond foodprints.

It is worth the walk. Worth the ache in your aging legs.
to empty yourself. To find yourself.
To find what is left when you let everything else go
and join the demons on the wind.

It is worth the walk.
And too, worth the walk back.
For that is part of it.
You cannot live here forever.
You were not made to be a monk in the desert,
only a pilgrim.
There is a world that needs your meger talents,
and you come back to it
both empty
and armed.
I have just come back from a few days at Cape Cod. The effects have not yet worn off, and that is a good thing.
Tom Atkins Jan 2020
The house sits at the edge of the woods.
Long abandoned the forest has taken over.
Vines tendril through nooks and crannies.
The door hangs on one hinge.
In the center of it all, a tree has grown,
pushing its way through the roof,
The ironwork has rusted.
The floor has collapsed.
And the mortar between the bricks has fallen out.
Bricks litter the floor,

Evidence
of what happens, slowly,
from the first moment of surrender
to the last.
About buildings. About our own lives, on so many fronts.
Tom Atkins Mar 2020
Early March in Vermont, and for a week now
the snow has slowly melted into the landscape.
The sap runs from the maples to the sugar houses.

It is easy to believe winter is done,
releasing its grip, softening the earth
with its promise of greening.

But I lived long enough to know winter
does not surrender so easily. It will come again
and hold the season hostage with ice and new snow.

And we will complain. We will whine.
Somehow forgetting this happens each year
and that spring comes in fits and starts

and false springs may bring more grey weather
and white, icy landscapes, but they too will pass,
for each false spring is a harbinger of the inevitable.
False Spring actually is an accepted season here in Vermont. A teaser. Sometimes, our progress in life is the same way, healing done in fits and starts. The poem is about both.
Tom Atkins Feb 2021
Poetry fails you.
A season of too much sameness
has left you flat, a creature more of habit
than enthusiasm, pushing through,
spitting your words out helter-skelter,
lacking grace and light,
You have little to say. Waiting for inspiration.
You need roads, strange walls and windows,
new light, the roar and rustle of waves,
museums and mansions
and strange hotel rooms in new cities.

You have spent the year plunging your own depths
and there is little new there to discover.
You are thinner than you believed. Simpler.
Your needs for survival more than met,
you need new food. You need to get lost for a while
and find your way back, always looking for fire escapes,
not to flee, but to enter through windows like a thief,
somewhere, anywhere, new.
About this Poem

I don’t think, until the past couple of years, that I realized how much new places played in my life and creativity. And thus how much the lack of them has worn me down.

The picture I used with this poem was taken in New York City. Until all this I often found some business to do there a couple of times a year, and scheduled some extra time just to wander. I love the city, most any city actually. Not as a place to live but as a place to recharge.

I wonder sometimes, if I could live in the city. Moving to a new place late in my life. has taught me something I always I always believed: That I could probably live anywhere and still find places of peace. It’s something inside us. The landscape only contributes.

Tom
Tom Atkins Apr 2020
The first flowers begin at the bottom,
New shoots of forsythia,
almost out of sight unless you look close.

The promise of spring
lies always near the roots.
Tom Atkins Dec 2020
You sip your coffee.
You take a bite of the sausage gravy, thick and salty.

The music playing in the diner is strange.
If music could be danish modern, this would be it,
streamlines and bleached, oddly pure,
in a language you cannot understand and yet somehow, do.

In a flash you are young and old,
moments of the journey like a roller coaster,
a madman’s collage with tunes.

And the words. Like a bad flashback scene, they come,
a B movie, or worse, lurid and darkly humorous,
other people’s words, each one a memory and a trigger,
leading to another and yet another.

Were I not so vibrant, it would be an end of life montage,
and you sit sipping, taking it all in, aware that no matter what happens
from here on out, you have survived the wreckages,
landing like a cat thrown out the window
so often you almost laugh when you fly,
knowing somehow, your feet are awaiting you below.
Tom Atkins Mar 2020
He sits on the small stage,
Long hair and mustaches,
costumed and dressed in his Renaissance finery.

Three women sit off to one side.
Madrigal singers, waiting
for his perfect rhythm, his perfect low notes
to begin.

Four strings.
Nothing more.
Four strings
and infinite possibilities.
I am sitting at a McDonalds in Rutland, Vermont. Down the street a block my old Isuzu Trooper is getting new tires while I sip bad coffee and eat my breakfast and write.

I have been reviewing my poems and reviewing my journal entries for the last decade and a half, trying to get a realistic sense of my journey during this time. How did I completely change my whole life around in that time? Why? What parts were ****** on me and what parts did I choose? Which of those choices were good ones and which were, shall we say, less than optimal?

It’s been a fascinating read. Fascinating to be reminded of how simple I actually am and how simple my needs are. How so many of my best changes resulted from being true to that simplicity and how those less than great ones were generally caused by drift.

When I began therapy way back when, one of the things that struck me is how, despite the complicated emotional mess I was in, nothing was really new. I was not nearly as unique as I thought I was. People had been going through the same things, in variations, forever.

And so too, the answers were simple. I was the one making it complicated. by not understanding that I and my situations and emotions were not nearly as unique as I believed. Once I grasped that concept, I could trust the therapist to guide me along proven paths. No need to reinvent anything special for me. The paths were already there. That concept has largely guided me ever since. In life, love, family, work, and faith.

Yes, we are complex, but not in the way we think. There are a few things we all need and want. Care for those things and there are infinite possibilities of what we can make of ourselves. Don’t care for those things and there are infinite ways we can muck our lives up.

But always, there are those basics. A feeling of safety and security. (Physical and emotional) Acceptance. Being nourished. Purpose.

Just like the young man playing the bass in the picture I used to illustrate the poem on my blog. Four strings. Infinite possibilities.

A long explanation for a simple poem.
Tom Atkins Jan 2020
Dreams.
Never ordinary.
Surreal landscapes.
Unrecognizable creatures.
Dead people dancing.

Voices.
Always voices.
Voices of the dead.
Of betrayers and lost loves.
Voices of strangers in the night.

Colors.
Impossibly vivid.
Bursts of light in the darkness.
often with music.
Full moon madness every night.

as if your mind rebels in the dark,
unwilling to allow you the peace you dream of
in the day.
I dream a lot. In color. Often with a soundtrack. So vividly that at times I wake up and it takes a moment to determine which is real and which is a dream.

I am sure a dream reader would have a field day with me. Mostly, I am glad they fade quickly.

Tom
Tom Atkins Dec 2019
You sip your coffee in a nearby diner.
The place is empty.
It is too cold outside for wandering,
even to familiar places.

Part of you is still numb,
Historic wounds still holding sway.
You sip your coffee in a strange kind of meditation,
waiting for the feelings to break like river ice.
I am a slow processor of emotions.

I was first exposed to winter rivers clogged with massive blocks of ice piled one on the other until the surface resemble building blocks thrown in a two-year-old’s temper tantrum, when I moved here to New England. Ten years later I love seeing it.

I really am at my favorite diner. It really is empty. Even the cook is downstairs doing some kitchen prep. I use my time in the diner to write, which involved working on breaking my emotions loose.

From those three things, this poem.

But lest you think it was that easy and clear, this began as a long, long rambling sort of poem.  It is a bad writing habit of mine to write around the main thing. I once had a writing teacher, Richard Dillard, who said my life would be spent finding the poem in my poem. He was right. More than he knew.
Tom Atkins Jan 2021
You stumble on the picture, one of the cats,
the one who started feral,
skinny and covered with sores, crying out
from across two yards, hiding in the brush
and underneath the carcasses of old cars,
until slowly, oh so slowly he came closer
to your outstretched hand. Days. Weeks.
A month. More. But he came.

And here he is, fat and fluffy,
owning his house and yards to both sides,
thoroughly domesticated, hardly remembering
his time of sores, bleeding and hunger,
sure of his place in a world that loves him
unconditionally.

You stumble on the picture,
and think less of the cat than your own life,
and the woman who reminded you that love is
what you believed it could be
later in life than you imagined possible.
If you were a cat, you’d purr.
About this poem.

A love poem. I don’t think I will ever get used to the joy of finding the woman I love at this stage of my life.

On my blog, this poem is accompanied by a picture of a fat yellow and white cat on my front porch. He really was feral a couple of years ago, but you’d never know it.

Tom
Tom Atkins Dec 2019
There are flowers on the window sill.
Wildflowers in a blue vase.
A small oasis
in a life that is anything but.

You release a sigh,
and with it, tension.
You focus, completely on the still life

and feel your own heart still,
your breath slow.
You fall into yourself,

You sip your coffee,
your morning slowed to the point
you control it. Not the other way around.

There is a small smile on your face.
Today will be a day of victories.
You know it, not even knowing the battles that await you.

Still. Slow. Aware,
you are invincible.
How we start our day can color the entire day. The days I manage to keep to my routine of prayer, meditation, and writing, I can handle anything.

I have a lot of little places of peace around my house. Still life vignettes. They do my soul good. Not quite temples, but soul stilling none the less.

Today is a good day.

From those things, this poem.

Tom
Tom Atkins Feb 2020
You have used the same palette for years,
mixing watercolors until they are indistinguishable,
one from the other, then washing it clean to begin again,

The plastic washes white each time, perfect and new,
bright and ready to start again, a new mix
of colors and texture, so easy

to save yourself
from yourself.
I have Lent on the mind this week.

I am also an artist and I really have been using the same plastic palette for watercolors for years. Six of them, I think.

I believe in the power of forgiveness and grace to make us new. I have been blessed to experience them both.

From all that, today’s poem.
Tom Atkins May 2019
Dark, dank, it holds history.
It has risen, fallen, fallen into disrepair.
Stones have been carted off to build their frankenhouses.
Bandits have hovered in the night
waiting to separate their Victorian adventurers from their purses.
The homeless have huddled here,
tiny fires smudging the walls in the Roman night.
Today tourists come
to gape at the circus home of the famous and fallen.

You come too
and the grotto feels all too familiar.
The dampness seeps into your bones.
The broken statue feels eerily familiar,
eerily like yourself, not quite whole.

You wait for the demons.
They live here. They always have,
even the great Augustus had them,
creatures of the night, gentle and brutal,
capable of murdering marble,
the leavers of wounds.

There is an altar in the grotto.
You are tempted to pray,
to sprinkle the holy water that seeps down the wall
into the air like some pagan baptism.

But you do not.
This is what you have learned.
The demons live within
and that is where the battle is fought,
with or without tourists,
so you can see this grotto for what it is,
a thing of history,
incapable of holding you.

About this poem
On my blog, the poem is posted with a photo (mine) of the Emperor Augustus’ home in Rome on Palatine Hill overlooking the forum. Augustus was the first emperor of Rome.

I began writing the blog eleven or twelve years ago as therapy, literally. My therapist wanted me to begin writing again, believing righty that I needed to write to find my way through my darkest times. She also, again rightly, understood that I would probably not do it if I had to do it for myself. But if I put it “out there”, I would feel responsible to continue, even if I only had a couple of regular readers.  In the beginning, that’s all I had.

Those of you who have read me for a while have been my tourists, sharing my staggering journey with me. Thank you for not being scared away. The demons are a smaller lot, knowing you are looking.

I believe that.

Tom
Tom Atkins Feb 2020
Light. Space.
Line. Interruptions.
Triggers and memory.
A gallery with art on one wall,
a mix of truth and pain.
compelling whispers shout.
A place to learn what you say,
what you create,
matters less
than what is seen and heard.
Light. Space.
Line. Interruptions.
Triggers and memory.
A poem for all creators. We think we are creating X. But as soon as our creation is read, seen, heard by others, it becomes something entirely new.
Tom Atkins May 2019
Another cup of coffee.
Please.
I need to wake up.
The night’s dreaming has left me
disjointed.

surprised

to be alive.

It’s not the first time.
Not at all.
I’ve lived in the nightmarish dark
far too long,
far too often.
I am experienced in blindness,
swinging my sword at ghosts,
shieldless save for God.
Each day new wounds bleed.
Each day new wounds heal.

And so here I am.
A decade and more later,
a collector of scars,
a strange sort of warrior,
living in the half light.
I am in a good place in my life. That amazes me more than you can know.

Tom
Tom Atkins Apr 2020
There is perhaps,
a little guilt,
that in the midst of the plague year,
my heart still beats fastest
when you are near.
True story.
Tom Atkins Feb 2020
It sits at the foot of the leather chair in your living room.
A car, carved from a single piece of wood
when your father was just a boy.
Nothing recognizable, simply a design
in the mind of a child too sensitive for his time and place.

There is a ribbon taped to the bottom with old cellophane tape.
Third place. A national award from General Motors,
a contest created to awaken young designers,
and set them on a path of creativity and industrial design.
It took. You have the drawings your father made,
all swooping fenders and steel lines.

They beat much of his heart out of him in that time and place.
They made him tough and hard, his brokenness disguised
as strength and rough corners. He tended his wounds
with alcohol and anger.

But his desire to create never left him. Sober, he was brilliant,
an innate understanding of things and possibilities
punctuated his life and through him, mine.
He died just a few short years ago.

We have choices of what to remember. What to keep.
I choose things like this car that sits unobtrusively
at the foot of the leather chair. I choose made things
and they surround me like an aura, even
when they go unnoticed by those who merely come and go.
Pretty autobiographical, both for my father and myself. The car and the prize and the bullying and the tender heart scarred, alcohol, and my memories are all real things.
Tom Atkins Dec 2020
Maybe Remembered

Some call it art. Some do not.
Prattle perhaps. Scribble.
It shows up in the night.
It is read by strangers and friends.
Passers by.
Bits of it resound. Maybe remembered.

It fades with the weather.
That is the nature of it.
Circumstances that resonated a week, a season,
moments that made it all resonate
before it fades.

In time, someone will paint over it.
Maybe you. New words. New poems.

Every day you do it. Every day.
Grateful anyone reads. Always surprised.
Still. Still surprised.

There was a time you wanted to be famous.
Not that poets and artists from obscure places
end up on the Tonight Show. You never were
the most realistic crayon out there.
But you had dreams, some of them borrowed.

The odd thing is how many you made happen.
not yours. Yours got lost. Your grafitti painted over
with billboards and a need to be loved.

You broke of course.
It’s what happens when the best of you
is painted over.

And that brokeness was the best thing,
the darkness made you real.
Made you, you. That child you remembered,
gleefully painting mindless color,
capturing what was lost.
Capturing what was found
picking up the scattered words
and re-arranging, a happy puzzle,
and angry puzzle. Everything immediate
or poor history. Feelings. Nothing more.

Graffiti.
You make it.
And walk to the next wall.
Never famous.
And happier for it.
The moment is enough.
I seem to be thinking back on my life a lot lately. Not morbidly or with a sense of loss, just in a “Wow, what a journey!” sort of way. In gratitude.

Why do I believe in God? Because there is no other explanation of how things so broken can become, not whole, but new.

Bring on the ray guns. It’s dancing time.

Tom
Tom Atkins May 2020
A black man dies on a city street,
the policeman’s knee on his neck,
breath, life taken from him.

There are riots. Of course there are.
A people ignored too long will erupt sooner or later.
A people not heard too long with erupt sooner or later.

This is a truth we ignore,
an ugly truth.
A universal truth we should understand

from our holy books
and the history repeating itself
again and again and again.

People are made to be loved and cared for,
and when we are not, we either die, or erupt.
too often both.

We know this from our holy books.
We preach it from our pulpits.
and yet we are content to ignore it,

avoiding discomfort, a bit here and there.
avoiding conversation, and listening,
hoping somehow we can deny the truth of neglect.

But the poets and the prophets agree with history.
We can continue it ignore them only so long
before the roof falls in.
I don’t often get political in my poetry. But what happened this week in Minnesota is not an isolated incident. It is a spiritual failure, of not treating everyone as if they were people of value until we become all “us vs them”. It is a failure of the love we profess. A slow unraveling until, as the poet W. B. Yeats writes “Things fall apart.”
Tom Atkins Apr 2020
This is the view from where I sit.

Just to the right of me is the work table,
covered in brushes and paint
and half-finished paintings.
There are things that need to be framed,
and a plethora of pens.

There is no glamour to it.
A working space with good light
and more importantly, time,
set apart, for just this thing,
to get the rest of the world out of my way
and make room for the stuff that comes slowly,

the inspiration, the god-breath
that pulls things out of me no one knew
were there, much less me.

Some artist, me.
I spend far more time staring into space
than applying paint. Thinking you might call it
if you were generous and kind.
It is far less than that,
I am waiting with expectation,
trusting the universe will not leave me empty
for too long.
During this time of Coronavirus, I spend a chunk of each day in my art studio in nearby Granville, NY.  I don’t paint the whole time. No. I do my morning devotions here, write a time, talk to clients on Zoom and Skype, and then later, paint.

I am a “manna” kind of artist. I rarely have something in mind when I start. Instead, I empty myself, (I do this with poetry as well.), and then wait for the emotions to leak out. In general, the better I do at emptying myself, the better the art.

Inspiration, the word, originates from a phrase that means “God-Breathed”. The ancients used to believe that God filled artists with their art, whatever form it came in. And perhaps he does. But with me, he has to work with an empty canvas, because the only way I can create honestly, is to be empty, and wait for what leaks out.  Because, as we all learned in high school physics, Nature abhors a vacuum,
Tom Atkins Jun 2020
There is always that chance
that you have forgotten;
that the week of neglect,
of pretending to be a vegetable,
and putting your spiritual disciplines aside
have rendered you mute.

It has happened before.

But then the tide comes in
and the tide goes out,
and a new miracle parades in front of you,
ripples in the sand, abstract art
from a playful creator,

and you remember.
again.
And begin
again,
knowing that no matter what is erased,
something is created.
This morning, after a week of vacation on Cape Cod, the woman I love said something about hoping she could remember how to do her job. I know the feeling. Whenever I am away from my writing or my art for any period of time, there is this brief moment of doubt when I begin again, this feeling that I won’t be able to do it.

That feeling has been part of my life for ages, and while I know it is balderdash, it still flickers until I start, and then it evaporates.

There was a period of my life when I did not write or create for years. Starting back up was frightful. But obviously, it worked out.

Newton’s Third Law of Motion states that when two bodies interact, they apply forces to one another that are equal in magnitude and opposite in direction. In other words, energy is never lost, simply balanced and equaled out. I believe the same is true of creativity.

I think of creativity as a spiritual discipline. The word “inspiration” comes from a root phrase that means “God-breathed”.

A weird mix for a poem’s inception. But there you are. My mind is like that sometimes.
Tom Atkins Jan 2021
Slow down.
Press forward.
Throw out a few things.
Stand outside in the storms.
Slow down
Be more aware. Of everything.
Look upward more. Look beyond.
Tell fear
to *******.
Throw away a few more things.

Remember
the value of real things,
the cost of false things.
Pet the cats.
Hold your wife
more.
Let the lost things stay lost.
Find new things.
Dance more.
Listen to more music.

Understand
you are enough.
Impromptu. Unplanned. I hate resolutions. But here we are.

Happy 2021. May it be better than you hope.

Tom
Tom Atkins May 2020
A crab leg, disattached and thrown on the beach
by tides and waves, its color still vibrant
as if its dismembering was a recent thing,
an escape perhaps, from the trap
that claimed the rest of the crab, destined
to become someone’s dinner.

But not this leg. It is a remainder, all that is left,
a splash of God’s art on the sand,
temporary as life, just as precious,
flaunting it’s broken beauty for just the briefest moment
between waves,

It was fate that I happened along.
Or perhaps more than fate. Perhaps
I was fated to see it, to capture its image,
fated to make certain its life and its death
were captured, recorded,
its beauty made less fleeting
than traps ever wished for.

Another wave and it is gone.
Tom Atkins Dec 2019
Yours is the art of the broken.
Always patching. Always aware
that nothing and no one is perfect,
least of all you, that all things
are in a state of constant repair
and readjustment, never quite
and likely to never be quite, and so
you paint, you write, you stumble
in public, one of the broken masses
only louder than most,
less willing to hide the cracks,
or perhaps only, less able.

You have no plan.
An age of plans have blown up in your face
time and time again, mocking
your presumption, finally able
to simply be, simply do,
less a creature of inspiration
than a plugger, stuck with
your inability to surrender,
a construction worker building happiness
one mess at a time.
I have been in my art studio for just at a year now. The picture shows what I started with. It’s actually my favorite picture of the studio, mess and all, complete with the presumption, in the form of the sign on the table, that it would become more.

Now it is a working place, with tables and easels and a whole slew of half-finished work and paintings on the wall, always in a state of flux as my thoughts and work changes and grows, as I get things right and get things wrong.

It’s not a perfect studio. Not particularly photogenic. You’ll probably never see it in an issue of better homes and studios. But it’s mine. It’s me. Gloriously, loudly, imperfect.

This morning, I read an article about how the search for perfection kills the good. I’ve lived that one. Never again. Now, it’s just about progress. Growth. One step at a time. One day at a time. How did I grow today? What did I try? What did I risk? What can I learn from it all?

It’s a different life. At times harder and at times easier. But I am so much happier with it. At 64, I cannot recall being this close to happiness. And for a depressed guy, that’s a big statement.

A lot of that has to do with the woman I love. She is so honest, so real, so loving. Able to let me struggle and she shares her own, leaving me with no doubt, none at all, of the depth of her love.

And if we are mostly adult children (And I believe we are), that kind of total love is life-saving. Stumbling is never fatal. Grace lives.

Be well. Travel wisely,

Tom
Tom Atkins Sep 2020
“Put it out there.” she said,
that first therapist, the one who saw you
at your blackest, every sin and flaw
laid out to this perfect stranger in some blind faith,
or more truthfully,
in your desperate need for confession.

You learned the hard way the corrosion
of pretending perfection. It’s corrosion
on you and all you touched. But the whole idea
of peeling the layers off, one by one, in public,
when you could barely admit your boils and brokenness yourself
seemed a whole new kind of madness
before you had cured the first kind.

“Put it out there.” she said.
“You are a creature of discipline,
and you feel a responsibility, even if only one or two reads
to continue writing.
The bloodletting will be your cure
and to do it in the market square
will help your healing. Trust me.”

I didn’t of course. Trust that is.
I was far from a place where I could trust anyone,
but too, I was desperate,
and so I began that slow strip tease
I continue today,

unwrapping layer after layer where anyone can watch,
never knowing where to stop exactly,
when enough is enough and when perhaps
I have moved to something too close to the flesh
where I will burn for my perfidy of truth telling
and when I do not strip enough away that no one cares.
It’s a strange game, poetry as therapy,
poetry as strip teases, but who knew,
fifteen years later,
that there were still layers left
It seems I always began publishing poems because of someone else. It really was my first therapist, fifteen years ago, who got me started. I was on the blogger platform then, and years later I had maybe 30 readers. Moving to WordPress six years ago and there are a lot more of you.

The poetry really is something of a strip tease. How much truth and how much fiction to make something worth reading, and still true at its core. It’s a strange thing and I don’t pretend to have it figured out yet. Thank you all for putting up with my grand experiment in public self therapy.

Blessings,

Tom
Tom Atkins Apr 2020
The boat is tied neatly against the pier.
The teak gleams but you can see the wear,
the marks of decades of use.

The things that make it able
have been maintained. You can see that.
The hull lacks barnacles. The ropes are fresh

and if the cleats show pits of oxidation,
they are small. Nothing has been allowed
to weather far. It is a craft ready,

made for travel, to ride wind and wave
using no more than its own strength
and the wisdom of its sailor

to trim the sails just so, always adjusting
to the fickle shifts of the ocean.
A survivor, never allowing neglect

to stand in the way of journey.
Even now, in this strange season,
docked too long to the wooden pier,

its whole purpose, whole meaning,
put on hold by fate and laws,
there is work to be done.

For the West wind always returns. Always.
There will be new horizons and the secret
to meeting the new necessities the West wind brings

is to do the work, not of maintenance,
but preparation.
About wooden sailboats of course. That is obvious. My father  and I restored an old wooden sailboat when I was a young man and it was a constant battery of work to be done to keep her ready to sail.

About our time right now. Quarantined, I am trying to spend much of my time learning, preparing, doing the work to launch, even if I know not when.

The picture was taken in Mystic Harbor, CT.  I loved its name and swore I would write a poem around it someday. Four years later, I finally got around to it.

Be well. Travel wisely, even if it is in your own head and heart.

Especially if it is in your own head and heart.
Tom Atkins Dec 2019
The studio has been closed for nearly two months.
It is cold there, and the paints are stiff and thick.
You turn on the heater, but it will take time
before your breath ceases to create clouds with each breath.

There are two half-finished paintings, so old
you have lost the inspiration that started them.
They look flat and lifeless and you cannot choose
between finishing, or whitewashing to start again.

There is a large frame on the floor awaiting new canvas.
but you are feeling small, diminished, not ready for boldness,
growing back into yourself one step at a time.
Forward. Back. Forward again.

You are uncertain. Your feelings have been overwhelmed
by your brush with death and you cannot even name the demons, if demons they are, that haunt you.
They are like ghosts, disappearing each time you draw near.

There is a chair in the middle of the floor. A garish thing,
full of bright magic. Half-finished, the color fighting
the original dark stain, the carvings crying for color.
A color you cannot feel.

But feelings are fleeting. As desirable as they are,
you learned long ago you can function without them,
and that it is the work that brings them back,
that allows you to overcome the things that overcome you.

And so you pick up a brush. With effort, you squeeze
the first bright color onto the palette. Red.
The color of passion reclaimed. The color of blood.
The color you lack.

And you paint.
I have been out of my studio for about six or seven weeks, unable to stand long enough to do any good work. With luck, I go back for a few hours tomorrow.

Recovery is more than physical. There’s a mental/emotional/spiritual element as well, and often that takes longer than mere ****** healing. But there is rehab for that too.  I’ve lived in a place of numbness since that first announcement of cancer a few months ago. And even now, after all the tests and surgery and more tests, after beating it back to zero, that invisible part is just now starting to heal.

It’s all work. It’s all worth it.

And tomorrow? I’ll probably start with the chair.

Tom
Tom Atkins Feb 2020
The ball rolls, bounces and spins.
The crowd holds its breath,
anticipating, against the odds,
their magic number.

It stops. Money, in small plastic chits,
designed to lessen the loss,
changes hands.
And it begins again.

The wild card. The odd number,
the stacked odds when you play with fate,
all for the thrill, your mind lost
to passion and hope and the excitement

of beating the odds.

I do not gamble. I have lost enough
to set myself up for loss yet again.
There is no thrill in the game.
I have been drained of hope and pretense

that the fates favor me.
Better to run under their radar,
to deprive them of the chance to crush my hopes
and leave me broken.

I have become a student of the old ways.
Simple. True. Faithful.
I need less now than then, and with that less,
I have more to lose.

Leave others to play. They believe
in their place in the pantheon of gods and fates.
You watch, wondering how long they can lose
and still believe.
One of the eye openers when I entered therapy after my divorce is that I was nothing special, that all the mistakes I had made, all the struggles I fought have been fought by countless others before me.

The good news about that is that I did not have to create a whole new way of healing and growing. Others before me had already forged the path. I only had to take it. And so it was that I learned I can do anything, without gambling on new ways. The path is already there.
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