it’s easier when you are out of town
now
I don’t long to see you
when you are gone
because I can’t
it’s easier when you are out of town
now
I don’t long to see you
when you are gone
because I can’t
Dang, I’ve got a lot of stages. So it is a long playlist! I can’t complain (yes I can), after all, I wrote the stages. Hmm, to work, to work, to play, to PEACE.
Twisting words- The Grass is Blue – Dolly Parton
Confusion- Get it Worked On -Delbert McClinton
Denial- Old Number 7- The Devil Makes Three
Bargaining – Gallows Pole- Alvin Youngblood Hart
Anger- Joanne Little- Sweet Honey in the Rock
Bitterness -The Wound That Never Heals – Jim White
Revenge -Silver Dagger- Dolly Parton
Acting Out – Pills I Took- Hank Williams III
Oppositional Defiance- All Hail- The Devil Makes Three
Grief -Days Like These – Over the Rhine
Acceptance- In my time of dying – Alvin Youngblood Hart
Forgiveness -Jesus on the Mainline – Mississippi Fred McDowell
Healing- I be your water- Sweet Honey in the Rock
Hope – So Glad I’m Here- Sweet Honey in the Rock
Reconciliation – You are loved, Victoria Williams
Peace – Everybody Ought to Know (and) Redemption Song- Sweet Honey in the Rock
We have stages of grief. Now if we are going to make peace, we need to break it down into the stages that we need to go through. I think this incorporates and embodies the stages of grief. We need to plan peace. We need a map to get there, and it is not a simple road. We can’t just say I am peaceful. We must do the work. Here are the stages I can think of and I have certainly gotten stuck in some of these stages. What about you? No…or are you in denial? And if not you, I would bet money that you can name someone who you think or feel is stuck in one of these. Takes one to know one though, right? No, maybe that’s wrong. Stop confusing me!
And maybe we don’t all go through all of these stages. Or go through them in the same order. When I watch families grieve after a death, they often fight. They fight about how to grieve. The family members may be in very different stages, or the family may have stages or roles assigned to certain people, who may or may not accept the assigned role. My maternal family has anger assigned to me. I don’t really care any more. Since I am not angry, presumably they can’t handle anger and need to outsource it. I got tired of saying “I am not angry” and being told that yes, you are angry until I would get angry… you see the problem, right? It got ridiculous. My sense of the absurd kicked in and then I would try to really enjoy being angry. You are supposed to give things your best effort, right? Snort.
Message me if you think of some stages that I’ve missed! Then we can all get to work, on working through these. MAKE PEACE, PEACE OUT, PEACE ME, PEACE YOU, PEACE THE WORLD! Might take a while. Get on it, get to work.
Twisting words
Confusion
Denial
Bargaining
Anger
Bitterness
Revenge
Acting Out
Oppositional Defiance
Acceptance
Forgiveness
Healing
Hope
Reconciliation
Peace
_____________
What does the helmet have to do with this? Nothing… I just like the helmet. I keep thinking that it could be a breastplate instead of a helmet. And it is a clue to my May blogging… where am I? Where is this helmet?
For Fibbing Friday.
we are talking about silence
yours deliberate
you don’t want people to know
how you make your money
you are angry, I notice
at how people treat you
you are a self made man
with a lot of money
I don’t much care
about your money
happy for you
& etc
I am more interested in silence
I go silent in Kindergarten
because I am too weird
have no tv
and want to sing
I do not bother to lie
because people don’t listen anyhow
and they don’t believe me
I listen, you say
I read everything you send me
That is not enough, I think
I don’t say it
I think about saying it
I don’t say it
I stopped sending you my poems
months ago
when you got angry
I asked if you would respond
something
a positive
a negative
even just “Read it.”
I don’t understand
why you got angry
and I am not scared
so much as surprised
I guess you brook no criticism
ever
I wonder why you must be perfect
seems tiring to me
at any rate
I am not sending you any poems
any more
since then
you could read my blog
I post some there
selected ones
unexceptional
less personal
though I suppose you could still
be angry
you say you know I am angry
when I go silent
I go silent, thinking about that
you are right that there is anger there
in the room with us
you sense it
it is yours, not mine
the bear chained in the dungeon
roaring
poor bear
I send it love
and it is crying
bitter tears
wet and cold
in a pool of tears
I can’t free it
only you can
for a moment you are aware
that I am silent about my poems
then you slam the dungeon door again
and talk about guns and science
and what you will do next
and what you will do next
with your bear
and without me
___________________
For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: distorted.
Blessing
You have my blessing to travel
Now, then forever.
You have my blessing to travel
With your guitar.
Go, with my blessing, travel.
Or don’t, as you will.
You have my blessing to hunt.
Now, then, forever.
You have my blessing to hunt
With your guns.
Go, with my blessing, hunt
Or don’t, as you will.
You have my blessing to sing.
Now, then, forever.
You have my blessing to sing
With your guitar.
Go, with my blessing, sing.
Or don’t, as you will.
You have my blessing to travel
But not with me.
You have my blessing to hunt
But not with me.
You have my blessing to sing
But not with me.
You have my blessing, not me.
Now, then, forever.
________________________
For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: grief.
I wrote this in 2016, when at least nine people died of overdoses in Vancouver, BC at Christmas, from fentanyl. I knew fentanyl was hitting my corner of the Washington State too. Warning, this contains a lot of swearing (edited so this does not become a “mature” site). I was in a very bad mood when I wrote it. It is meant to be black humor, to help me deal with grief.
But the news today is STILL talking about fentanyl and overdose: https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/12/us/west-point-cadets-overdose-fentanyl/index.html. When will we ever learn? And also, drug dealers are not actually trustworthy…. your cocaine might contain fentanyl. Don’t do it.
donβt kill your clients
oh, you think I’m talking to physicians….
….no, I’m talking to my fellow dealers.
See, heroin is rather labor intensive to produce, being from the opium poppy and all that. (When people say “I only take natural supplements.” I want to say, “You mean like opium and heroin? You know, plant based.”) Also, Afganistan, those fungkers shoot you as soon as look at you. It turns out that fentanyl is cheaper to make and you can source the ingredients from China.
And then, you can make fake oxycodone tabs and fake hydrocondone pills and sell them for bitcoin on the silk road. But you know, ya gotta mix the sheet right. If you mix it wrong and a buncha people overdose and die, there are complaints. Ya might get some scared clients, like, junkie friends of junkies. And then there are also those chronic pain people who aren’t junkies but been forced onto the streets to treat they habit, I mean, pain. We got a good thing going, the pill thing, because the junkies think that pills is safer than heroin. You might scare the fungkers and then how the fungk will I be able to buy that island with my bitcoin?
So dealers, ya’ll fungkheads, ya messing it up if you don’t get the goddarn mix right. See, fentanyl is not routinely tested for on the blood and urine drug screens. So the person gets labelled as an oxycodone overdose and no one knows that it’s fake pills. But when there are too many deaths, the goddarn feds and doctors get suspicious and start testing the pills.
Same with heroin. Cheapens things to cut it with fentenyl. But you gotta calculate right, because if you kill a whole bunch of clients at once, 1. you cut into profits 2. you make the cops and docs suspicious. You gonna ruin it for everyone, you goddarn morons.
And now I hear we got a new mix. Carfentanil, an elephant tranquilizer. Read the recipes carefully, morons, it’s 10,000 times as strong as morphine, you gotta dilute the sheet 10,000 times. Don’t you know math? Take a goddarn chemistry course.
Don’t fungk things up for the responsible drug dealers. A live client keeps on paying.
Be careful out there.
Wait, another? We don’t go through the stages of grief once. We go around and around, like a spiral. Some days we want to lie down in the driveway and just not move. Others it seems like the there might be a tiny bit of sun in the world after all. A mourning handout from the American Academy of Family Practice writes about a culture where one is considered “legitimately crazy” for a year after the death of someone loved. The person is allowed to be emotional, complain, wear their bathrobe all day and call people at 3 am.
Maybe we are all in that stage right now.
Stages of Grief Playlist 2
Denial
The Offspring: Pretty Fly for a White Guy
Bargaining
Kate and Anna McGarrigle: Hard Times Come Again No More
Anger
The Offspring: The opioid diaries
Acting Out
Nathanial Ratcliff and the Night Sweats: SOB
Revenge
Bessie Smith: Young Womanβs Blues
Grief
Over the Rhine: Let it Fall
Acceptance
Sweet Honey in the Rock: Run, Mourner, Run
Stages of grief playlist
My sister had breast cancer for 7 years. She said that the five stages of grief missed two. She adds βActing Outβ and βRevengeβ. I am planning a series of stages of grief playlists, because we are coming up on one million US citizens dead of Covid-19 and we are at six million world wide and counting. We need help grieving. I have other stuff going on to, so my go to is music.
Denial
Eagle Mountain String Band
Bargaining
Lake Street Dive: I want you back
Anger
Over the Rhine: oh yeah by the way
Acting out
Lily Allen: Smile
Revenge
Lily Allen: Fuck you
Grief
Citizen Cope: Sideways
Acceptance
Over the Rhine: All of My Favorite People
My theme for the April AtoZ blog challenge this year is art. I think it will mostly be my mother’s art. She died in 2000 of ovarian cancer. My only sibling died in 2012 of breast cancer and my father in 2013 of emphysema. And I have the art: my parents were both packrats and trying to deal with the house and an out of date will took about three years. Moving stuff around, getting rid of stuff. The art initially went in to a storage unit and then into my house. My mother Helen Burling Ottaway was prolific! And she kept every single piece of art and her diaries back to high school! I found a suitcase with my grandfather’s poetry as well: that will be for another day.
This painting is of my sister. My mother started oils later in her career and Michael Platt, a DC artist, said something like, “Quit doing tiny things. Do something big.” My mother started doing life size and larger than life portraits in chalk pastel and in oils. This painting captures my sister when she was twenty: emotions. I like it but I also think that it is frightening.

BLIND WILDERNESS
in front of the garden gate - JezzieG
Discover and re-discover Mexicoβs cuisine, culture and history through the recipes, backyard stories and other interesting findings of an expatriate in Canada
Or not, depending on my mood
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain!
An onion has many layers. So have I!
Exploring the great outdoors one step at a time
Some of the creative paths that escaped from my brain!
Books, reading and more ... with an Australian focus ... written on Ngunnawal Country
Engaging in some lyrical athletics whilst painting pictures with words and pounding the pavement. I run; blog; write poetry; chase after my kids & drink coffee.
Coast-to-coast US bike tour
Generative AI
Climbing, Outdoors, Life!
imperfect pictures
Refugees welcome - FlΓΌchtlinge willkommen I am teaching German to refugees. Ich unterrichte geflΓΌchtete Menschen in der deutschen Sprache. I am writing this blog in English and German because my friends speak English and German. Ich schreibe auf Deutsch und Englisch, weil meine Freunde Deutsch und Englisch sprechen.
En fotoblogg
Books by author Diana Coombes
NEW FLOWERY JOURNEYS
in search of a better us
Personal Blog
Raku pottery, vases, and gifts
π πππππΎπ πΆπππ½π―ππΎππ.πΌππ ππππΎ.
Taking the camera for a walk!!!
From the Existential to the Mundane - From Poetry to Prose
1 Man and His Bloody Dog
Homepage Engaging the World, Hearing the World and speaking for the World.
Anne M Bray's art blog, and then some.
My Personal Rants, Ravings, & Ruminations
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