Category: Sobriety

Dear Character Defect

I need to let you go now.

Because you interfere with my ability to experience the joy of doing something for the simple love of doing it.  Because you have me spending too much of the limited time I have in this head focusing on who or what is better or worse instead of what is.  Because you rob me of celebrating my successes and those of other people.  Because you are an aging artifact of the behavior of insecure, immature people who could not make good decisions but were in charge of my formation.

You are a portrait painted by hurt people, no less a construct than the fairy tales I was nursed on and rejected.  Believing in you perpetuates the hurt and fear of your creators; keeps that hurt and fear spinning out into the world.

This doesn’t mean I give up my right to practice discernment.  I intend to use brain and eyes to the best of my ability.  I intend to be right sized.

I have people now who hold me in their strong hands – neither blind to my faults and humanity, nor disgusted by them; neither dazzled by my gifts and talents, nor jealous, fearful, and dismissive of them.

I can breathe.  I can stretch.  I can fall.  I can get up.  I can smile at the mirror and at the rest of this raggedy family.

Don’t Read This

For god’s sake, put down the book

and do something useful.

Open a window, blow the stink off;

stir fry up some fresh vegetables,

call a friend to join you for dinner;

buy a card for someone who’s sick;

go outside and get some exercise,

you’re pale and gone to flab, look

at those thighs!; wash your kitchen floor,

it’s full of dog hair, bird seed hulls

and muddy footprints; and walk that dog,

she’s getting tired of sitting home

with nothing to do but eat the crotch

out of your old underpants; light a candle,

say a prayer for the dead, or the living,

or for yourself, somewhere in between.

The Good Die Young

The rest of us live.

We clean the truck’s windows; wash the sheets;

press our thumbnails into our child’s wrist to quiet her down;

hear the hollow thunk of our shoe connect with the dog’s chin,

half accidentally;

turn cruelly from the weak; buy a little something for ourselves;

tell the joke that hardens a heart;

forget his birthday, the anniversary, our sorrow.

While we worship the good who have gone before

we can not help

but love ourselves.

Not Jumping

The mind is not always our friend

The wanting to die dies hard.

Not that I really want to.

I can be happy –

taking the dog with me to the Post Office,

smelling the first wood fire of the season –

but when I cut back on the viaduct I freeze.

Well, I make it across,

but I have to talk to the dog

the whole way to keep

from stepping over the rail.

Or I’m driving to work,

singing Birds do it, bees do it

and a semi passes.

I have to clamp my hands tight

to keep from steering into that space under the trailer.

I’m pretty sure my car would fit.

People think I’m skittish,

afraid of heights and speeds and such,

but I’m telling you

that’s not exactly it.

Call

Call I’ve got the telephone cradled against my shoulder and through the receiver, soft and pushy like the cat’s cheek or Nat King Cole’s voice you keep saying It’s going to be all right. It’s going to be all right. I’m hanging onto a telephone, a bleak voice speaking to me from a black space … Continue reading “Call”

Call

I’ve got the telephone

cradled against my shoulder

and through the receiver,

soft and pushy like the cat’s cheek

or Nat King Cole’s voice

you keep saying

It’s going to be all right.

It’s going to be all right.

I’m hanging onto a telephone,

a bleak voice speaking to me from

a black space where the inevitable

might not happen tonight.

Winter Sun

1.

We prayed for this, didn’t we?

Days and days and days

of darkness dampened us

and we lay limp,

our blackwatch plaid flannel

covered with dog hair.

Praying.

2.

Thank God

I didn’t have to tell him how long I’ve been sober

because I know what he’d think: Why

aren’t you better?  Why

aren’t you well?

3.

Finally outside

we pick paper from the crotch of a fallen branch,

shovel old news burst from its plastic tubing,

and consider how little is left

of fresh or green.

Church Basement

True stories, every one.

Here we learn to ease open our hearts

and to hold them open with both hands,

letting something human flow among us –

for the one with the lichen smile,

the one still proud to have blown Chuck Berry,

the one who can argue herself out of everything

but the first drink,

the one who knows how to introduce someone else’s

urine into his bladder,

the one who ran over his baby.

Here we hold our kin with a hard affection.

Here love is a verb, active, transformative.