I wrote emo poetry in high school: Exhibit A

I steep in misery
the bitter brew secreted from my soul
diffusing into the cup
to linger at the bottom with the dregs and hopeless dreams.
It hangs on the back of my mouth
long after I swallow and grimace.
If I let the tea leaves lie long
after the steaming mug has gone tepid
will they mellow, losing their bite?
Can hopelessness and anxiety
be washed off with scalding water?
or will I only be damp and depressed,
borrowed British serenity fading away
as the tea cools in my stomach?

goodbyes

I understand why a heron flees at my arrival.
Crashing through the underbrush, I have broken the spell, and things which were silent and unacknowledged must flap away impressively deeper into the growth as the light dies in the autumn sky.
Yet still every time I am saddened. The heartbreak is always fresh as for a moment, the heron and I stare, stark recognition and the tremendous quivering fear that I have transgressed some boundary of his domain. Do I hold my breath? Do I take one cautious step, shift my weight, try to hold every ounce of muscle still to my will? Is that wrong, as caught in his gaze I try to be closer to touch the stabbing wildness even as it touches my memory, that image, the subtle discovery of other resounding deep and far down inside my mind? Do I glance down for a second breaking eye contact, and what has made me uneasy in the face of this unwavering stranger? Does the heron's gaze weigh more than his sudden flight, winging above the riverbed and beyond the treelined banks, yellowing for a moment with late afternoon sun? The rare gold of this memory is measured in sadness.

It is very precious to me.

I will keep enacting this scene, I will crash and flail in the underbrush on autumn walks, always at sunset, and when some minute change, a stillness invoked from the air makes me aware of the heron's gaze, I will be still, I will be sad, I will be perfect, and he will leave. The tragedy thus continues, how could I wish it otherwise, I for my glimpse of eternity, followed by the reminder of his power to withdraw. I am myself, always arriving just in time to see him leave-- which is too late-- always the outsider, always too loud. There is something the heron wants, and to my dismay it cannot be me. But if I am myself, I am part of this scene too, I do what is in my nature, so my presence is no more unsettling than the heron's. What do I tell him that he cannot bear, from which he must turn away and fly? What do I say in my unwitting pursuit about the wildness of the soul?

Held the presses for long enough, i think

So I just went through another period of senescence. Creative abstinence might be a more correct term, though it doesn't encompass the withering shoots going from green to yellow and souring fruit wrinkling and turning hard and sad. I am sometimes a cantankerous old maid, and let my worries keep me in my rocker on the front porch wagging my finger at the world. How much power fear can hold over us! It take a tremendous effort to lift that all off my shoulders vertically, but I've understood the intellectual concept behind melting my fear away. I just need to know it in myself and put it into practice.
I walked around in a mind-dance, wrapped in myself, living in a place that I couldn't explain beyond the pages of books, between the covers. It was fine and I did not know my loss and my loneliness until a man saw me today, and talked directly to the thing in my heart living in the minds of long-dead writers. He stood on a rock and the black-eyed susan he held in his teeth stared straight through me, and I was pinned to myself by his questions, and the manner in which he addressed me. A genuine address to my sleeping self. He held out the flicker or thread on whose tension my whole life is held taut. I am convinced he was an unwitting prophet for just that one moment when he was God talking to me.
What could I do? I stammered, I stuttered, but I was me, after all. And I had never wanted to wake up so much. When my mind is not on fire, it is only damp logs. The sparks hurt too badly if it takes them a while to catch, and disappointment is an acrid smoke of failure clutching at my throat. I feel the layers of swaddling and fight against them. How much more painful still to know that if I were to wake, I would only feel that good as often as a person such as this came into my life, or simply crossed my path as today. A torn soul I fled, not flew, from that brightly shining being. God doesn't want me to give him the middle finger, but reality is too rare and too beautiful to bear on a day like this.

Always a first

Tonight I was not as moved by something as I was when first I experienced it. I feel old.