I have been sick for eons. Or has it been seconds? Feverish with fever dreams and fevered mental processes. Mostly they resolve themselves into poetry.
to bloom with reckless haste, and
The wild things whisper:
you are responsible for
each of us you tame.
Palms outstretched, skyward
she condensed the universe.
Fragile like a bomb.
I wrote a thousand words explaining that I am slipping away, but when I reread the pages they only said I have become so vulnerable over and over and over. There is no way forward that makes sense, so I turn off my processes (I built a tall stone wall around my heart years ago) and sit infinitely in the present. Observing the sensations (of fear, anger, anxiety, joy, despondency, as they manifest) on my body. God's grace is when the mental quiet takes me gently to sleep.
I am a soul with a body, having a human experience on repeat.
While we were on our getaway weekend I had a nightmare of a mass killing. There were two sides and I can't remember what divided them. Crips and bloods? Cops and robbers? Cat parents and dog parents? Does the why every justify the what? One side got the upper hand and the men on the other side began dying. Gunshot wounds to the head, but not lethal enough to instantly kill. As each man was shot, my perspective adjusted itself to his consciousness. So I could be there to experience the dying, each time. The last man thought he would outsmart his enemy, and with his one remaining bullet, turned the gun on himself and blew out the back of his head. Unfortunately it did not kill him, and after I watched the attempted suicide in graphic detail, my perspective zoomed to his consciousness. One of the enemy approached him, rifle in hand, and began raping the dying man's throat with the barrel of his gun.
This was the image that forced me back to wakefulness. I lay in the bed with my husband snoring next to me, wondering if it was one event or a series of smaller insignificant occurrences, which broke me so deeply. I am a soul with a body, having a human experience as I observed my breath flowing in and flowing out of my nose.
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One more haiku to prove to myself that I am still mostly human.
yes! oh yes! oh God, don't stop!
The sheets are wet with us.
