43 and me

Awaking post-birthday to phone notes full of unsent e-mails, unfinished poems, grocery lists…everyone tells me I look great at 43 and I don’t have to be humble about it, I look good, I feel good and I worked really hard to get here. The first birthday I’ve spent sober in over 20 years. A dog named Hank, a boy named Sue, tornado season rollin through.

Egon Schiele

“I like to sleep alone, spread across the bed like a skydiver”. When I was a kid I would fall asleep to music to drown out the violence, Dolores O’Riordan as my surrogate, Mogwai in the Walkman as a teen in a van traveling cross-country, the roommate’s Sigur Ros in chorus with his gnashing teeth in the 20’s. Now, its quiet, alone. Survival is my greatest asset, I am unkillable. I learned to live alone, to have my own opinions, to know exactly who I am.

The boy and I are bonded deeply, he’s abuzz with imagination, wonder, exuberance. I take him in in small doses and breathe.

Unexpectedly I read at my friend Matthew Freeman’s poetry series, RE: Born, and ran into my old Kiwi friend Christopher Parr, whom I hadn’t seen in nearly 20 years, and enjoyed watching Irish poet Eamonn Wall read for St. Patrick’s Day:

Confounded by the incredible lengths a person will go to to avoid facing the reality of a neutral party telling them that they’re mistaken or wrong. Spending a day off in the sun while the boy suffers allergies. I awake with his little hand on my forehead, then coughing in my face. Purging the phone of old cancerous contacts, further engineering the life I want, free of false “community”, free of farce, of cowardice, narcissists, whimpering dolts, bumbling boobs, corny twats. I spent an intimate night round the fire with a small cadre of loyalists, we all reveled in the company and companionship. I’m not in any rush, I like being alone, someone will reach out to love me, all my little micro-crushes, all the aching desires that pinch at me. Exchanging “I love you’s” with Sarah and excited in the act. The plants are outside, the garden is sown, Magnolias abloom, its all coming back.

Here are all the random unfinished ideas in the Poem Ideas file in my notes":

”Aching
For so many
Small things
Like wipers squeaking
Cross the window
Or taking the old way home

If you weren’t
running
To my arms
Every day
At 3:45
There really
Would be
No point

I’ve been tortured
By imagination
More than twice
Navigating
This nightmare maze
Of memory

The mind
Will go
Wherever
While idle

The air
In your lungs
Keeps me
Afloat”

”Softly sobbing
In these places
Navigating
The nightmare maze
Of memories”

”These twilight
Moments
Of dissolution
Where empty space
Cannot be sated

We cannot stem
These fetid
Reveries

Immobilized
In longing
Bewildered
At the vacuum

I clung to you
For warmth
Among the redwoods
Two loves
Radiating heaven
If ever after
Fondly
Doth reflect
I will accept
That offering”

”The recoiling sound
Of snapping steel
Beneath the ice
As my weight
Shifts the balance

At peace
In the dunk tank
I follow my breath
Furtive
In the night”

”I am raw
For the predators
Of love
The blood
In the water
The stench
On the wind”

”The moon
Is a fingernail
An abstraction
Of hidden light

I never planned
To be here”

Thank you for reading.


XO JWS