POETRY 2001-2002

This is the last entry in the series. Thanks for reading. Hope I haven't bored anybody to death. It felt good to type them all out from my Blue Giraffe journal scrawlings. Sort of a cleansing process, I guess.

This is prose, not poetry. It's one of the last things I wrote in my journal last year, so I decided to include it in the series anyway.

Of fire and men

I left home at 15 with a fire raging in my soul.

Three years later, I left again-this time clear across the nation. College began for me with equal parts elation and depression. The fire was still eating me. I tried to slake it with attention from others.

My teachers admired my art and my intelligence. My friends admired my generosity and creativity. Men admired my tiny waist and long legs-which became progressively more visible as my dresses grew shorter and tighter. I thrived on the attention.

My roomate, Suzanne, had a different method. She slit her wrists several times over the course of our living together. It certainly got some attention, but didn't help her relationships much. I tried to be a good friend to her. We'd talk and dance and bake cookies together-but I don't know if I helped her much, I was pretty overwhelmed myself.

Sculpting, drawing, writing-art of all kinds has always been a passion and a solace for me, as well as a way of putting something of myself, my real, inner self, out into the world where people can see it.

My life then was a searching. I loved school for all the new discoveries there were. Life drawing was always my favorite. I could never get tired of looking at, sketching, outlining, filling in and capturing naked people. There's something so uniquely exquisite in the human form. I love to follow the curves and angles, to draw-to sculpt!-the soft flesh, the boney ends, the silky hair...

But if art gave me respite, the rest of my life was an adventure in the topsy-turvy world of love. Each time I fell in love I thought I'd found what I was aching for.
My fire would bank itself for a time and I would lie content, held in those strong arms that promised so much. I gave myself with wild abandon in those days, paying no heed to the warning signs flashing right before my eyes.

My men were dark and beautiful. To me, they were noble, struggling so hard in an unfair world and for them, I was their Goddess! I would save them with my generous outpouring of love. I failed to notice my resources ebbing, debts mounting. Niaive, I didn't read the signs of their addictions, their deep, unhealed wounds. Truth always came too late, and bit like a knife in the gut. That knife twisted deepest when the end inevitably came and I heard the words of breaking up fall from my lips like a magic spell...saw them sink in...watched the men I had loved-did love!-deflate. So many times this scene has played out in my life. And always, the relentless pursuit, the forced amputation, as they swear love and then HATE and I must sever them from my life like a wolfs trapped leg.

Here perhaps my fire has served me well. A blazing force that kept me upright when I would have collapsed at their feet and begged forgiveness and mercy. Art is definately the way to go. My sculptures don't yell in my face. They never call me a cold bitch, they don't twist my words and batter me with their hate, anger and pain. And they certainly don't look at me with eyes too aware of loss and full of grief that beg me to try harder to forgive again, again and again.

Yeah, I think I'm gonna stick to art. Just art... Who knows, maybe I'll find a way to quench that fire myself.

Feb 6th, 2002

Wow, it's been strange rewriting all this. Seems there's a lesson here for me. I suppose it's one of those psychological biggies like not looking outside myself for the love and attention, acceptance and admiration I should find within. Being still, remaining calm, open. Not pursuing, grasping, seizing for a hold on life, on love. It's coalescing for me, slowly, bit by bit, in the poetry I write, the books I read, the people I meet, my life experience... It's bringing me around to meet myself.

Can I sit by myself, wholly alone? Just sit and relax into who I am, face whatever lies within, without running? Without hiding? Without distraction?

It's odd, of all the terrifying things life brings us face to face with, I think the most difficult is just to sit and truly look at ourselves. Do we think we will see something so ugly, so dreadful, that we won't be able to live with ourselves?

Or is it because we are afraid there is no self to look at? That all our little collection of wishes, of likes and dislikes, of loves and hates, boils down to nothing? No solid being. No real me.

No Roseanne at all.