Get burned up in the process.
I was struck again and again,
intent be damned.
It happened to me, happened to you.
The scratches and scars
left by unspoken needs, unacknowledged wants.
Now strewn around on the ground,
left to rot or flourish,
some seeds take off, some do not.
And still others may lay just dormant,
I feel them.
Doing the work of uprooting some,examining their structures and pathways.
Admitting the ways it became gangrenous and unruly,
the ways it choked the life from us all.
Didn't like where the story was going
what it was saying, the lessons it evoked.
Didn't feel fuzzy or fun
but still full of truths that cannot now be unseen, nor explained away.
The realness of the realest truths,
skinned me to the very bone.
The rawness on my exposed sense of self,
knowledge of the world, of myself in this place.
All up for grabs, up to be molded and melded.
The discomfort in this process cannot be described,
a joyfully frightful venture through thickened brush
and deceptions and traps,
set by me, set by others, by the world I've known.
Using machetes and other even blunted tools within reach.
Cut it down, pick up the bits of assorted trash and debris.
Make it all anew, foreign and fresh
casting previous tools of comfort aside.
Seeking new methods and means and models.
Rewrite the damn narrative, whatever it was or is.
Cast it out, cast me out.
No longer allowed preoccupations of you, of us.
I am where and with whom exactly I need be,
should always have been.
Holding it all in or releasing it all out,
whatever the space and place demands.
Finding clearness in the confusion of it all.
What is life? What is this head space?
Evaluating each moment, each thought.
I get up, I breathe, I rotate my head around and see
that I've become the person I dreamed I wanted to be.
That grueling, grimacing, glamorized version of a woman,
of a person,
that you see in films. Manic, pixie. Clementine.
It's not what you'd think it to be.
Whether intentional or not, this is where I am.
Later it might be a perfect show, a montage of grieving scenes
spliced with moments of dance, yelling in a car,
cursing the air, cursing the gods,
scribbling furiously.
The green, green grass I sit upon
Watering can, pulling up weeds.
This avant gardener I've become.
I'm beautiful and I'm breathing
not thinking much of what could or would be.
Inadvertently present and clever
and oddly
zen-like as ever.
Fourth Jhana by Eugenia Loli
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