Even though this poem looks like musings on painful things, it was written in the spirit of moving on. I found myself at a turning point:
Do I let all of those old memories, habits, negative things I was taught, hang on to me? Do I let them calcify in my soul until I'm frozen in cynicism and defeat, like the people with the bone-forming disease? Or do I carefully arrange my soul in a position where good things are always welcome? If I inevitably grow stiff with age, can I possibly stiffen with my arms wide open to happiness? I'm not sure how I might change the poem, except to add this preface, and to note that I have, in the time since I wrote this, become very open to joy.
In the small bedroom of my childhood, my books and teddy bears protected me from the emptiness of the house. Outside, a dark and lonely night, my bedroom door is shut like magical iron.
Do I let all of those old memories, habits, negative things I was taught, hang on to me? Do I let them calcify in my soul until I'm frozen in cynicism and defeat, like the people with the bone-forming disease? Or do I carefully arrange my soul in a position where good things are always welcome? If I inevitably grow stiff with age, can I possibly stiffen with my arms wide open to happiness? I'm not sure how I might change the poem, except to add this preface, and to note that I have, in the time since I wrote this, become very open to joy.
In the small bedroom of my childhood, my books and teddy bears protected me from the emptiness of the house. Outside, a dark and lonely night, my bedroom door is shut like magical iron.
Guard your position.
School, a place of learning, what it is to stand up at the top of the tower where all the children long to be, King of All. The boy I displaced is angry, waits after the recess-bell to throw a ball of mud at my new shirt as punishment. Humiliation of his fragile ego, worthy of violent rage. In my world, this is Male : Female. I should have stayed on the tower, let a teacher sort it out, but I had reason to believe I was invisible.
Guard your position.
There is a disease where the body takes every injury as a prompt to lay down bone. Every bruised muscle fills with calcium and sets where it lays, position contorted or denied; body a prison, a sculpture of the positions each limb took before they were entombed. If you must live, it would be wise to choose the way your new bones set up.
Guard your position.
I am not at the midpoint of a lengthy life, but near. There are choices to make. I always thought—promised myself—that I would be fearless, that I would not become embittered, cynical, defeated. I told myself that, before I believed in the existence of fear, and cynicism, and defeat.
Guard your position.
I see the way others live their lives, where they have arrived, twenty years from now. There are choices to make. If I must live, it is wise to choose the way my heart sets up. Not lay down at night in fear, wake with fear encrusted like misplaced bone. Keep moving, keep moving, but if I stop, be sure to stop where joy is, and hope, and willingness to love.
Guard your position.
Guard your position.
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