Maturity
One day, I looked out into sea.
The waves were tossing
As if they were being blown by an almighty wind,
And the sand pulled away from the
Edge of the water as if in fear
Of being swallowed and drowned
By the powerful current.
As I watched, I thought how silly
It was for the sand to run like that…
The others were making her do this. Said it was time, well past time. As if there was a time limit on grief. That after a set number of days, or weeks, months or even years, you could turn off the sadness like a light switch. A simple click and all sorrow and pain is gone, and your life can resume undisturbed.
There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” ~ Ernest Hemingway
We aren’t the typical family. We don’t share familial blood reaching back generations, but we do suffer from a shared madness. Our family curse, non compos mentis, brings us together to chew over our afflictions, to swap outlines and plots.
We hear voices.
Your WordPress.com dashboard is the nerve center of your blog: it’s where your ideas come to life, and your creativity gives them shape. As writers, artists, and thinkers, we know inspiration can be sporadic and those moments of genius are fleeting -- they come and go, which means that sometimes your literary flame burns out, and those bursts of creation are short-lived.
My father died three weeks ago. He was in hospice, with all the pharmacological and technological assistance available to keep him comfortable and pain-free, but it was still, as deaths go, not a good one.
I had flown in hours after I’d heard about his fall. He was in late-stage heart and renal failure, and this fall was the beginning of the end.
when your daughter
or daughter's daughter
lies bleeding in bed
butchered by a wire
then tell me of your
moral code
protecting the unborn
at all cost
sacrificing a woman's life
to appease
man's
distorted words
of god
go ahead
have another cigarette
after raping
her rights
hell smoke
the whole damn pack
if it brings
an end
to fools…
aunt bea
was sitting
on the front porch
with a neighbor lady
discussing
how much
things
haven't
changed
aunt bea
said
you can
put as many ornaments
on a tree
as
you want
but
what lies
beneath
is still
a naked tree
discrimination
is
discrimination
no matter
how many
glitter laws
you put
on the books
such mandates
when held only…
- Patrick Dennis
When the sun is out, the lighting is perfect enough so that you can see those math problems, so that you can see where you are going when you're running, so that you have enough energy to do your chores, or anything else "productive".
But if the point of life is to be forever productive, we're going nowhere, if we follow the conventional idea of productivity.
