Category Archives: 7 sins and friends

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This too two

This too two I want to remember.
Disagreeing. Respectful nearly always.
You say, “You argue with everything.”
“I think about both sides.” I say.
“And if I am alone I discuss both with myself.”
You roll your eyes and I grin and continue.
This too two I want to remember.

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This too

This too I want to remember.
Discussions of the world together.
The mysteries of science and sweatpants strings.
String theory and medicine, cabbages and kings.
Why the sea is boiling hot and whether pigs have wings.
This too I want to remember.

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Piece meal

Trigger warning: gruesome humor?

I miss people at this time of year, only sometimes then I remember things that make me not miss them after all. That ambivalence. Love can be pretty complicated. Then I started thinking about what specifically I miss and then it morphed into this poem.

I really miss your hands: send them to me.
Send your heart too since you don’t use it.
You don’t see me or even look. I’ll take those eyes.
I miss your voice: send your tongue and larynx.
Bellows to mend, better add your lungs.
You eat too much protein, I’d care for those kidneys.
That brain is not too bad, I’ll admit. Ok, I’ll take it too.
Those feet and ankles and shins and legs are nice to walk with.
You really aren’t kind to your liver: I would be.
You can’t stomach me. Hand it over.
Most people don’t value their intestines nearly enough: I will.
You chose not to listen to me: abandoned ears, finder’s keepers.
You surely won’t use the bits that are left. Give them to me.
I may not reassemble you correctly but it will keep me entertained.
Piece meal.

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The photograph is from January 2022, on the east coast.

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Reconcile

I have been thinking about family a lot this week. My mother’s family has been gossiping about me now for a decade and not one of them has ever talked to me directly about my father’s will. They have a story. They never checked it. It stars me as a villain. They seem to think I controlled attorneys, which is laughable.

I forgive them.

However, I think a decade is enough. I forgive them but I no longer want to reconcile. For ten years I hoped that they would talk to me. I have asked them to, more than one person, more than once. They say that they want to believe what they want to believe. I offered to send copies of bank statements to back up what I said. No. And a cousin silenced me by saying, “Don’t make me hate my sister.” The message is that I can be part of the family for some of them, as long as I remain silent as a tomb on this topic.

No. I won’t. And it’s just like all the silencing that goes on over the world. People say they would not stand by while someone is hurt, but my family sure seems to enjoy having me be the silenced gossiped about villain. I am sick of it. They can go to where ever it is that karma will take them: gossip, after all, is a sin.

And so I am reconciled. I am reconciled after a decade to adding these people to my list of dead. Our friendship is dead, my family feeling towards them is dead, I am not asking or waiting or hoping any more.

Forgiveness is a solo job. We forgive others.

Forgiveness is NOT reconciliation. You should not take an abuser back. You should not let someone treat you badly and refuse to listen to you and refuse to apologize. I know one person whose apologies run something like “I am sorry that you took offense to what I said/did.” Um. That is not an apology. That is putting it on me, it’s my fault for taking offense. The person has no intention of changing and does not actually care how I feel. I am not okay with that. The person is forgiven but there has not been a reconciliation.

With my maternal family, I am letting it go. I would like there to be more peace in the world but as long as people cling to having villains, to believing gossip, to perpetuating gossip and hatred and meanness, I do not think we will have peace in the world.

But in letting this go, I have peace in my heart.

Peace you and please peace me.

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Paths

I am reinventing myself now. After my fourth pneumonia, oxygen continuously for a year and now my fifth pulmonologist since 2012. He did not have much to offer. An inhaler but “We can’t be sure that it will keep you from getting pneumonia.”

Well. So with ME-CFS, myalgic encephalopathy chronic fatigue syndrome, now what?

I am at a fork in the path. At least three forks.

  1. Try to do a micropractice, working with Long Covid people. Who either wear masks or I do not see them. I would have to convince the hospital district that it needs me.
  2. Write. I am doing that, but really focus on it and work on publishing. I have so much art from my mother. She did not really enjoy selling it though she loved having shows and would dress up.
  3. I could focus on publicizing and selling my mother’s art.
  4. There is a trunk from my grandfather. I could focus on that. He states that he wants it published. Grandfather, you were a piece of work.
  5. I could just lie around and travel and play with the cats and make music.
  6. Focus on music. I have written a number of songs. Apparently being hypoxic makes me write songs. I think they are peculiar and wonderful too. Flute, voice, guitar, piano, bass. Hmmmm.
  7. Something else. Who knows what will appear? I am doing art too, the two large sculptural pieces in my yard. A fellow doctor scolded me about one. It’s the one with a logging chain and an oxygen tank, attached to a tree. The title is “Tethered”. Now, why would a local doctor object to that? I have some small pieces too that involve found objects and especially feathers and small stemmed glassware.

Many forks! Now I just need more spoons of energy!

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For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: reinvent.

The photograph was taken in September 2021. Where is the path? I got to hear Jonathan Doyle last night, with George Radabaugh on piano. FABULOUS!

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mad bad sad

I am not good at stopping loving people, because I kept losing people as a very small child. I wanted to be loved and have people stay. So how to deal with people who leave now? Well, I talk to my dead in my head all the time, so if I think of the person as dead, then I can just continue on. The friendship is certainly dead, love or not.

I am also thinking about poetry forms. I am enjoying writing sonnets, but after all, I’ve written limericks and haiku for years. Not to mention enjoying the brilliant rhymes of Dr. Suess.

mad bad sad

You are dead and I am glad
It makes me sad that I am glad
that you are dead you make me mad
when you are bad and make me sad
as well as mad you sad bad dad
not my dad who was bad as well
except when good as I can tell
bad angels fell but there’s no hell
hells angels tell that heaven’s swell
and you are dead and I am glad
it makes me sad that I am glad
that you are dead makes me so mad
you were bad and made me sad
as well as mad you sad dead dad

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Yammer

You’ve joined my silent dead: doesn’t matter
whether you speak or not. You’d like this song
and be jealous of the skills. I yammer
to my dead, the number rising strong.
At sixty I declare that I am middle aged
Mom dies at sixty-one which feels unfair.
My sister dies at forty-nine, cancer rage.
I watched them both as chemo takes their hair.
You too are dead no words across the breach.
I yammer to you daily in my head.
Agates gleam, treasure on the beach.
You refuse to look, I mourn that you act dead.
You sit stubborn in a rocking chair alone.
You don’t believe your dead will call you home.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: yammer.

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sonnet 3

I have neither roots nor wings nor love.
I lie: friends gather round to talk each day.
The early dark slides over from above.
No one to warm my bed, for no one stays.
The dark creeps up a sickening horrid thief.
I have no heart to stay awake at night.
It’s barely five; why this flood of grief?
It’s only in the morning I’m alight
before the morning is even close to dawn.
Wide awake I clamber from my bed.
I stretch, the teapot sings and I just yawn
and wonder why the night brings on such dread.
I tell my friends that now I’ll date a tree.
He never leaves and he will stay with me.

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For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: roots.