the monster at the heart of the world

And the monster at the heart of the world
stretches out a claw
slices your heart clean open
and the blood spatters down
like tear drops
and where it falls
new flowers grow

Are they poison?
It's a risk
(isn't life
isn't any of this?)

They smell lovely
and I'm hungry
(where did you go?
why did you go?)

It's your own future, it's your own life
wield your machete
hack with your knife
snip away all you won't miss
carve a path
Do not apologize
Do not look back

Is it crazy?
It's a risk
(isn't life?
isn't any of this?)
I'm just tired.
I don't know.
(where did you go, friend?
why did you go?)


.


For Megan Burnett
May 2, 1989 - August 18, 2019

Keyhole

As I was paying for my purchases at Food Lion tonight, the cashier, a young black woman with a clean-shaven head, big red-framed glasses, and a delightful smile, glanced down and spotted the keyhole tattoo on my ankle.

"What's the significance of the keyhole?" she asked.

I shrugged and stammered. I've struggled with trying to explain it before. I said something along the lines of, "It's a long story. It has a special significance for me, with a certain loved one."

"Ah," she nodded knowingly, slipping the bag with my bread and tortilla chips into the cart.

As I thanked her and was about to walk away, she added, "Does someone else have the key?"

She meant a tattoo, perhaps on their ankle. That would be cute. Especially for a couple to do. She couldn't have meant the other meaning, my meaning, the real answer to her questions.

"Yes," I said, matching her smile. "Yes they do."

Exiled Kings

We share a world
We share a sky

(I'd rather share a kiss though, wouldn't I?)

We share a laugh
We share a sigh

(I'd rather share a life.)

(She's magic and I'm embers
Nobody here remembers
I used to be a flame
But now I struggle daily
To live up to the promise
Of my extraordinary name.)

Exiled kings. That what he said we are
Maybe my crown was broken for a reason
Maybe I was sent away to stay forever
I've bent my head and knelt before you
Queen of my heart, I adore you
But deserve you? Never.

We share a distance
We share a pang

(I'd rather share a name.)

We share a past
We'll share a present soon, together

(I'd rather share forever.)

Cathedrals Are Burning

Notre Dame burned the other day.

The world mourned. In the days to follow, wealthy donors reached out to offer assistance for the restoration of glorious architecture and works of art that were damaged in the blaze. Among those to offer assistance was the U.S. White House.

When I heard this I was angry. I couldn't express my anger well. I posted a link to the article and all I could think to write in the haze of my rage were the words "Puerto Rico" in all caps repeated five times. We couldn't spare the money to help those American citizens whose lives were left in ruins in the wake of Hurricane Maria, and yet we could send money to France to restore the ruins of Notre Dame. And friends added more names in the comments, Flint and Standing Rock most frequent among them. Not to mention countless other cities where young black men are murdered by police on a regular basis, or where schools and public events have become the sites of tragic mass shootings at the hands of crazed gunmen while lawmakers sit back and do nothing to prevent the cycle from continuing.

These thoughts were like fuel on the fire, and my rage burned that much hotter and higher.

Please understand: I'm grateful to those who would work to restore this holy place that is such an important symbol to the French people. My rage is not directed toward them, or their acts of generosity. But it is directed at an underlying attitude that influenced their decision-making. You see, priceless works of art were worth doling out thousands and millions of dollars to rescue. Human beings were not.

I think every heart's a cathedral.

I think every human person that walks this Earth is a priceless treasure trove of irreplaceable and unfathomable value.

It was people who painted those paintings and sculpted those sculptures and built those tall walls and soaring ceilings and erected that stunning steeple atop it all. It is people who admired it, who photographed it and painted it, who made it more than just the sum of its parts, imbuing it with a meaning that stone and metal and wood never had on their own.

Like Notre Dame, people are soaring and enormous on the inside. They're more dazzling and intricate than the kaleidoscope patterns of stained glass that formed the Rose Window. And like a chapel on Easter morning, a person can "contain multitudes" while also playing host to a hushed and sacred silence.

People are beautiful, of immeasurable value, unique, unparalleled, inestimably precious.

Yet we see them vandalized, cut down, and destroyed every day. We see these cathedrals burn on a regular basis, and we do not hurt for them or move to help them. Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale reminds us that "ordinary... is what you are used to," and so maybe that's it. We see so many cathedrals burning every single day that it just becomes easier to avert our eyes from the blaze.

This is what I was having trouble trying to say earlier. This is why I feel both saddened at the loss in Notre Dame but more angry in general at these millionaires' responses. I suppose it would be easier to just not care. It makes me want to turn to these people and say to them, as Quasimodo once asked of a gargoyle in Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame, "Why was I not made of stone like thee?"

Look Up

I'll take the blue skies with the grey
There's beauty in each hour
Look up no matter what they say
Hope is both pain and power
The sun gives life, the rain gives life
We need both in their measure
I'll take the splendor with the strife
The labor with the leisure

I'll take the tragic with the gay
The fertile with the barren
"Look up no matter what they say"?
It seems a fool's errand
For days are long, and nights are long
The Earth won't cease its spinning
I'll take the silence with the song
The end with the beginning

I'll take joy resplendent, sorrow bare,
Grief that consumes like fire
But I will not accept despair
Because it is a liar
Look up no matter what they say
Hope is both pain and power
And given time, and sun, and rain
A seed becomes a flower

Sam's Star

Since January 2018 I've been logging my steps, "journeying with Sam and Frodo" with the Walk to Morder app. I've found it hardest during the long middle sections where it doesn't seem like a lot is happening, and tend to look forward most to the milestones that align with favorite moments from the books. Sam's star has been the one I've been waiting for since the beginning. It's one of my favorite moments not only in Lord of the Rings but in literature as a whole.

I reached it today. I also found out today that Vanessa has stage four metastasized osteosarcoma and has 6-24 months to live. Tomorrow is her thirtieth birthday.

It seems a cruel joke to reach a milestone that's all about hope in the darkest of circumstances on a day like today. But I do sincerely believe that there is light and high beauty forever beyond the Shadow's reach. Even on days when the clouds don't part and I can't see it.

I Don't Want This Life

You probably remember August 21, 2017 as the day of the total solar eclipse. People nabbed their pairs of the special glasses you could use to look safely at the spectacle. The news covered it. Scientific website livestreamed the event (which I was grateful for, being in Newfoundland at the time and at a poor vantage to view it properly). I spent the day thoroughly cleaning my apartment-style dorm. I was the last of the roommates to leave, and thus responsible for making sure the public areas passed muster when the school did their end of term inspections. I was due to leave for a trip to Ireland (half research, half pleasure) the next morning, and was interspersing my bouts of cleaning with revisions to the ethics proposal I must have approved for this trip's research to even be permissible. I felt the normal amount of stress such a situation would foster, but nothing crazy.

But apparently I was wrong about that.

I remember August 21, 2017 as the day I ordered a pizza to eat while I cleaned/studied/watched the solar eclipse online, only to discover that I couldn't eat it because every time I started to chew a bite my throat would tighten and I would become convinced I was going to choke on it and die (since no one else was in the apartment, or probably even the dorm building since I had gotten permission to leave two days after everyone else). I had to take tiny bites and chew them double or triple the usual amount of time before I was satisfied I wouldn't choke, and even then sometimes the tightness in my throat made the swallowing painful.

It was a stress response. Or maybe anxiety. It had to be. I'd never experienced anything like it before and I was a wreck. Eating is, for better or for worse (usually for worse), the thing I turn to for comfort when I am stressed. To have it become a manifestation of my worry and fear and dread to the point that I couldn't properly consume sustenance - well, that was new levels of awful for me.

Tonight I'm feeling a bit like that. I'm not eating now. I'm trying to go to sleep. But my throat is closing up and I feel a tightness in my body but especially near my lymph nodes, and I'm getting the sniffles and a sore throat and I've been exhausted all week and I'm wondering if I'm getting sick or again if this is just a manifestation of all my worry. I just got done moving and now I have to move again. I need to do my taxes, twice because of two separate countries. I have a wonderful girlfriend and I want to keep her happy with this long distance thing until my trip to visit her at the end of April, but it's a trip which will probably mean I can't pay my bills the next month. I'm moving into a house where I'll probably have less space for my stuff and have to pay more money, but I have no choice in the matter because my roommate decided she was moving without really consulting me. I need to apply for a new job that will pay me enough so that I can actually afford to pay my bills and not go in debt buying gas and groceries each month, and even have enough leftover to start paying off my debts, but again - trapped.

I feel overwhelmed and helpless and like I have no agency in my own life. And I hate it.

I feel like I messed up my entire life to the point that I'm never going to have anything or do anything or be anything worthwhile and I might as well just give up.

I'm tired and I can't sleep. Just like a year and a half ago I was hungry and couldn't eat. But as the eclipse reminded us that day, the heavenly bodies all keep spinning merrily along. Life continues, even if we suffer.

την αγαπώ

Θα την φροντίσω
Θα αγωνιστώ γι 'αυτήν
την χρειάζομαι
Θα τη φιλήσω
Θα την αγκαλιάσω
την αγαπώ
Ναί. Είναι αληθινό
την αγαπώ
την αγαπώ
την αγαπώ

Social Media Metaphors

Facebook is like a party in a house of mirrors where you wander around from conversation to conversation. The guest list is bizarre - your grandma is here, and your friends from college, your coworkers, and maybe even an ex or two. You're expected to be polite, but things can often devolve if you bring up politics or religion. It's loud and the lights are low and what you manage to observe is distorted (thanks, algorithm - er, "mirrors"). At a certain point you come to suspect that everyone's amusing party anecdotes, carefully rehearsed for the crowd, are all just different versions of a story you've heard a million times before.

Instagram is your high school yearbook. All those school portraits that look like you but don't really look like you. Each club photo and team action shot carefully selected to tell a certain story of what happened. Of course, later on when you flip through the photographs you won't remember things as they actually were, just as they were presented here. And what is a yearbook without its signatures? All the "Have a great summer"s and "Be sure to write"s - like, like, like.

Twitter is a soapbox on a street corner. Only there's a soapbox on every street corner, so really it's a Greek chorus of doomsday prophets shouting endlessly from every crossroads in the city. They're all talking over each other in a terrible racket, and sometimes even though they're saying the same things, and maybe even things you agree with, it's all so terrible that you just want to cover your ears and run to a place beyond crossroads and street corners where you might at last find some peace.

The First Line of a Love Poem

I will write you the first line of a love poem
But no more, because I don't know what comes after
And I'm afraid if I try to wing it by myself
It'll just be a mess

Can I hand it off to you?
Can you discover the next bit
The cadence and the line breaks
And when you reach a part that doesn't make sense

Pass it back to me
And together we'll write something
We'd never have come up with
Otherwise

And here, I am stuck
I've rewritten this stanza half a dozen times at least
So let me stop struggling to say the unsayable.
Enough.

I offer this to you with all my love.