There are the broken people I’ve come to know
Who will never heal enough to walk
Straight
At all.
Whose bodies and minds and souls have collapsed under the weight of persistent
Pain.
Then there are those,
The group to which I belong,
Who live in joy
With the foreboding fear
Of the
Pain
Returning.
I will never be ok
There will never be a day where sadness will not feel free to knock on my mind
And send me somewhere I don’t want to go
Or a memory will not flood me and make me feel a drowning sensation
A gasp for air
A clutch at hope in the face of despair.
I will never be ok.
There will never be even a moment when my sense of safety will return
And a step into any unknown will not generate a fear as if I am dangling at the edge of a cliff.
I will never be ok.
There will never be an interaction with another that might not give way to me feeling slighted, insulted or manipulated.
And hurt will be experienced out of the blue.
I will never be ok.
But I find joy every day anyway.
I feel sunshine on my face on cold days.
I find beauty in the stars at night, despite the darkness.
I will never be ok.
I will be better than that.
I know now why my memory haunts me.
It doesn’t do it to betray me.
It doesn’t do it to cause me distress and reliving of hurt.
It is attempting to bring me back further than the hurt.
It is attempting to reunite me with my purity of my childhood.
Before it got complicated and hurtful,
And before I processed it that way.
It attempts to go back before each milestone so that I can touch the part of me that which was pure.
So it stops everywhere along the way.
I tend to re-feel all the hurt and confusion.
I forget all those who tried to love me and those that still do.
I still love all whom I’ve loved. They may too.
I forget
All those who reached out to me and I either found their imperfect selves
Or engaged my own imperfect hurtful self.
But now I am realizing that as I try to meditate myself back to the initial breath,
There are loved ones who saw me there.
Not that I was there, but when they heard me speak,
They heard my hope.
When they heard me laugh,
They heard my joy.
When I hugged them,
They felt my love –
Even when I did not –
Even when I could not.
I was not meant to be hurt.
I was hurt.
I was meant to shine a personal peace that radiated.
I was meant to shine a personal love that burst forth.
Somehow, sometimes I must have done that.
My memories, when taken in the whole –
Are something to celebrate.
As my hearing fades I must consider the good in that. Perhaps now the sound of thunder will frighten me less.And then someone asks, “But what of music, Art?”
And I glance straight ahead and answer, but only to myself, for speaking my truth aloud would only serve to alarm those who are in the vicinity who still hear well.
I say to myself, “I will ALWAYS hear music.
I have absorbed all that I’ve heard and enjoyed
And even now, with my hearing still partially intact, I compose entire musical pieces
in my mind to the extent that I hear them clearly and loudly as if played by the geniuses who’ve inspired this highly active imagination.
The sound of a solo double bass putting down a simple five note funky melody is subtly joined by sweet bleeps of a trio of sax, trumpet and trombone that rise to its own type of thunder.
A blast of energy blazes through in a blast of precision mixed with the swagger of Stevie Ray and vocals come forward from a mix of Janis Joplin and Bessie Smith
and I continue to evolve this piece through endless possibilities as my feet tap and my fingers snap to new found options in the music I’ve loved so much
and I know that nothing can take that away from me.”
And then someone asks, “What about your vision, Art?”
And I speak out loud that which I know.
“That of which I have experienced as beautiful,
My wife and my children and my whole family,
My friends,
My dogs,
My ocean,
My trees,
And all that I’ve taken in with my eyes and experienced the splendor,
are photographs in the scrapbook of my mind.
They, too, go with me, wherever I go.”
It is a hollow set of metaphors
to say over and over again
that the sun will come up tomorrow
and bring a new day,
without ever having stood in the predawn darkness
and experienced
the exquisite beauty of the first blast of light.
The SOUND was clear and pretty and insistent as it was melodious.
I searched the trees for the source.
I was able to discern the general location and then I heard the SOUND again, coming from the same area.
I looked carefully and thoroughly all the while the SOUND repeating over and over and over again.
I grew impatient at not being able to find the bird responsible for blessing me.
I still had the gift of this beautiful SOUND; this beautiful song.
And, now, I am ok with that.
I don’t know the singer.
But sometimes it’s the song,
not the singer.
I have a close and personal relationship with grief.
I don’t fear him.
When he visits, I pour a cup of coffee that we share,
While I look into the energy in grief’s eye.
I notice the tear welling up in the corner of grief’s eye
And when I tell grief how sorry I am for him
He tells me to kiss his ass
And then laughs a lot like I do.
He lets the tear flow down his cheek
onto his seemingly perpetually stubbly goatee.
He scratches his bald head.
He adjusts his eye glasses and continues to stare straight ahead.
He asks nothing of me and I ask nothing of him
and we just sit there looking into each other’s eyes
and communicate telepathically
as if we are one in the same.
But grief is different than me.
We are not one in the same.
He visits me sometimes and then leaves.
But it always seems to be when I am facing my reflection.
But still, we are not the same.
Art DuBois Poems and Photos 