Hello everyone. Thanks for bearing with me. It’s been a busy couple of months, so I relegated this newsletter to the “I’ll get to it later” pile. I’ve been busy writing every day, working my way through some stubborn prose while writing secret messages to myself in the form of stream-of-consciousness poetry. Each morning I write two pages in a journal and a one-page poem. I seldom read the journal entries unless a significant amount of time has passed, but the poems generally get aired after a year or so. I call them secret messages because the part of my brain that writes poems seems to have a keener grasp on reality than my up-front brain. The poems tend to reveal larger issues I am not actively thinking about, deeper emotions than I generally feel.
In light of that I am going to share some poems from 2011. They’ll be short, which is really all I can say about them. Some of these I remember writing, but most were one-and-done drafts that have been languishing on my hard drive.
Let me know what you think, if you feel like it. And thanks for reading.
Of Which She Would Not Speak
Once a wise woman from Oahu
a Kahuna Lapaau who at five had mended bones
with healing hands before she lost this ability
told me my lives were slaked in blood.
I was, she said, red to the elbow
in murdered men and all their ilk.
It was hard for me to hear especially
since she had told my friend
his aura was cracked, impossible to heal,
that he would stagger broken
all his life, lovely boy that he was.
She gripped my wrists in all earnestness,
begged me to abstain from murder.
She said she saw in me the worst of her dreams
saw in me something of which she would not speak.