This smile isn’t a lack of pain. It’s a victory gesture of not letting pain defeat me.
emotions
Bumpy fright
A nightmare is only a dream that hits turbulence.
Floral
My mind is like a seed packet of assorted wildflowers — I get happiness and sadness and whatever else
Pierced flight
thorns and stings
and those such things
just make stronger
our angel wings
P.S. Thank you to everyone who has written letting me know that Katya Elise Henry got a tattoo of this poem. Honestly, I didn’t know who she was and had to look it up. But that’s pretty cool, and a nice tattoo.
Hard to escape
Even happiness worries sometimes.
Speedway
The world is changing so fast I’ve got societal vertigo.
Are you – Nowhere – too?
In grief, one is so lost. Grieving is pacing back and forth between past and present — and a feeling of no longer belonging to either place. A feeling of no longer belonging anywhere — because the heart is the map, and with the map suddenly rewritten, one is so lost.
Falling
Fear is imagination falling off a cliff.
Truly lost
All these years
I thought ‘barren’
meant of the womb —
but now my body
has threatened me
with menopause
and I realize it
means of the heart.
Weighed down
the scale now shows me
one hundred sixty-eight
but in those simple digits
I see rejection and pain
sugar, laziness, exhaustion
hormones splayed out of whack
menopause ready to rumble
plaque buildup and repressions
anxiety, regret, some depression
the past, the future, sheer panic
tension, disoriented expectations
ice cream, sweet junk addictions
griefs, hurts, disappointments
bad habits, cliffs, fear, falling
the eating of all my emotions
gluttony and gorging ghosts
turbulent raging blood glucose
sleepless nights, too-busy days
nerves, toxins, worry, age
unwelcome rapid-fire change
lack of trying, trying too hard
loss of control, culinary excesses
no longer fitting into my dresses
Carrying
pick out your fears
worries, anger, and hate
from the bag of stones you carry
and love, find yourself lifted by
the wings of featherweight faith
Holes & tears
Missing you isn’t just an empty void — it’s what-ifs and questions and endless thoughts and bittersweet memories and runaway feelings and emotions that can’t get a hold on anything physical so just slip and slide around my mind, and hide and re-emerge.
Confessions of a Worrier
“If any man or woman knows more about worrying than I do, that man or woman is sincerely to be pitied. To begin with, I come of honorable generations of worriers, all of whom seemed to be deeply sensible of their responsibility for the carrying on of a world which they did not create. My grandfather used to worry about the weather and crops. My mother worried with an elaboration and finish which really lent distinction to her performance. She could worry harder and longer on less provocation than anybody else I ever knew. When it became my turn to take up the burden of the universe I was quite as successful as she.
“As a child, I worried about the end of the world, and the Unpardonable Sin, which I knew I had committed, if I could only find out what it was. I worried my way through school and into college, where my course in worry was so complete that I came out with nervous prostration and two deep furrows between my eyebrows which I shall wear, like the scars of battle they really are, to my dying day. And then I worried about the furrows!
“I began to see the light through reading Menticulture by Horace Fletcher which put a vague old Buddhist doctrine into a modern, concrete formula — ‘Anger and worry are bad habits of the mind. They are not necessary ingredients.’ Worry not necessary! I had always supposed it was as much my business to worry as it was to breathe, and I looked upon people who did not worry as the shirks and cowards of creation, who were easy in their minds simply because they were criminally indifferent to their duties.”
—Mary Boardman Page, “The Confessions of a Worrier,” 1899, a little altered