first love
When the world was an endless spread of dandelions in a vacant lot with the sweet summer grass higher than my shoulders, we walked together hand in hand, alone in our own enchanted world.
Daises sprinkled like stars over soft shorn lawn that resembled the sparkling stars at night as we lay on our backs in the cool summer night, counting the shooting stars whizzing through the heavens.
Aurora with her rosy fingers painted the light show in the far north which keep the sky lit with a shimmering glow until nearly midnight.
What more could a girl want?
"When I'm a man, I'll marry you."
Words never forgotten.
We played hide-and-seek and kick-the-can and all those things kids share, but the love was always there, growing as rambling rose trailing along a fence, binding life together and making the fence withstand the weather.
He moved; I moved, like pawn to bishop across the squares of life.
He proposed the toast before the crowd of many:
"Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds.."*
wrapt his glass about my arm and promised once again with a complete supporting cast.
Words written, treasured and shared.
Secrets he knew from dreams. Like a wizard he was uncannily aware.
I found him in a rocking chair, bound in a rigid corset—to keep his spine aligned. Look, don't cry, I can walk. besides the real pain is inside. The pain that nobody speaks; the pain behind the eyes, the fear inside the heart.
I was worried. I had a dream. you were raped, weren't you? Bastard I could kill him.
But you did the right thing—you survived.
Listen to me. I work with convicts, with criminals. I go to the prisons to work with inmates. It's how I earn money.
Promise me, that you'll never fight. You haven't a chance if you do. It's a threat to their ego, their masculinity and nothing more they want is control, so if you fight, they'll kill you.
Play dead.
Be apathetic.
Wait.
Be patient.
Be very patient.
When he thinks he has control and you act passive, he will lose focus.
He will be confident of his control and then at that point will be caught off guard.
Be patient because, at that point he will lower his guard.
You can escape.
But promise me, you'll never fight, because you'll never surivive.
And this other business with Don? It's nothing, isn't it? He doesn't respect you much. It's just gossip, empty chatter. You're too smart for him. He would have failed physics class if you hadn't done his homework for him. You deserve something better.
So I sat at on the floor and listened with my back resting on his hard legs.
So many years; so much pain, a fractured spine, a broken life…
and still I never forgot the words.
Not even when I found him hung over in a shack littered by newspapers and comic books..
The town was so small that only his name directed to me his hole.
Yet the billboards blared his name in screaming neon lights.
Sprawled over a rotting mattress on the floor, he didn't acknowledge me.
To talk to somebody, get on the level.
So I lowered myself to the debris on the floor.
It's not like this in fairytales—Gerda gets her man. She travels to the ends of the universe and redeems him from the icy killing grip of the Snow Queen.
The bus had a schedule. He didn't care.He lay on the floor cursing the stars like a tormented JB.
So far out of my way, so many miles—the bus had a schedule; I had a ticket and many miles to go.
So many miles and hours behind me. The daisy wreaths and chains we wove, the promises lay broken, scattered over an unkempt vacant lot of time.
Yet fields are filled with daisies made from shooting stars from heaven, scattered over soft shorn meadow grass, but the rambling roses on the fence have long been dead—their wooden tendrils clinging to broken fragments of ancient history.
The words I never forget.
* Shakespeare, Sonnet 116
http://www.shakespeare-online.com/sonnets/116.html
Advice to Young Poets
Don’t be afraid of your dark thoughts
but don’t give them absolute power either.
Put those dark thoughts in a well-lit room close by
and listen to them from a place of authority and calm.
When they are hungry, give your dark thoughts food grown in clean soil
and water from the clearest streams
because dark thoughts are really just ideas that are afraid.
Treat your dark thoughts like children who need care to become healthy.
Guide them into your art and let the art speak those fears
And when your thoughts are ill, let your art be the medicine and the hospital bed.
You are the doctor and the nurse and the midwife and the priest to them.
Let your art heal those dark thoughts so that they can become
what they are meant to be in the wholeness of you
as an artist
and a friend
and a human
living and breathing and growing all the time.
Don’t be afraid of dark thoughts.