Tide of unanswerables

Sometimes a piece rewrites itself…

“Oh, the poet…”

It doesn’t necessarily mean I am especially successful. It doesn’t necessarily mean they “get” what I write.  It doesn’t necessarily mean they’re a fan.

But it’s the thing I do. It’s the one noticeable thing that people can hang a label on. It’s the default setting when trying to tell someone who John is.

I write stuff.

I give away stuff I have written.

I share bits of poetry when I don’t know what else to do.

I see lyrical things in places that aren’t supposed to be poetic.

The supposed-to-bes don’t work.

The poetry keeps bubbling up.

People have, for as long as I can remember, been able to refer to me as a writer or a poet. 

One day I’ll get it right.

One day the bits that work –

like this bit,

and this bit,

and that bit you shared last week, you know the one…

One day there will be a paper chain of bits where I said the things that poets or writers or whatever it is I am supposed to be when I’m not chasing down starships between streetlights…

Yeah, that.

One day, I’ll be that.

I’m so much more than that, though, so much more than the so much less I often feel in this super competitive world – and sometimes it feels like the biggest, most insistent, most devastatingly passionate part of me is half drifting, 

half falling, 

half spinning with a flagrant disregard for the rule of thirds…

Part of me is lost in an invisible place, a place for all the pieces that never made it into paper chains. I’m banging on a window between undiscoverable countries, with no real sense of where the glass starts or ends…

or what might be peering in from the other side.

Sometimes the truth of it clarifies a little in something I write. But my work is so left field, so offbeat… and this world I fail so spectacularly to navigate has little tolerance for people who struggle over on the left field when there are so many solutions waiting over in the right place.

Most days, the world appears to be overflowing with answers. Often glib, smug, unsatisfying ones, to be sure…

but that’s ok. Because the world can live with those answers. The world can build lives and values on those answers – core values with a sweet wet crunch – and the world can bite into them while I am busy rolling uncontrollably down a jagged chain windows.

So here I am, writing this awkward uncomfortable poetry, sown as it is in uncomfortable soil… telling stories about all the poetic things I  have been hanging out with while nobody else was looking.

But truthfully, for all the different versions of myself I dig into in my search for inspiration, I don’t really know who or what I am… and that’s a truth with which I find myself struggling mightily at the moment.

I am struggling with the insistent echoes of a passion I seem to have lost on the road somewhere.  I am screaming deep inside with an unknowable thing that aches for a barely knowable answer… a crack in the merry-go-round of phoney certainties that seem so often to surround me. 

I am a small forgotten world on the edge of something huge, hoping I can find a kindness there. Hoping I can find a presence of some kind –

a cosmic paper chain, wide and gentle and beautiful enough to link all the fingers that have ever held me, stroked my cheek…

Lately, however, the closest thing to kindness has been a thing that only reveals itself in the throws of absence.

Have I lost kindness, or has kindness chosen to lose me?

Pages are torn out as fast as they are written –

my pages, my thoughts, crumbling into flame and ash beneath a cold sky that looks like a furnace. 

Right now, the loss of compassion is overwhelming, like the still-beating heart ripped out of a star…dreaming it was a cloud… dreaming we had found each other in the mist between hills.

Right now, the loss feels more desperate than any other crisis.

Can I rediscover it before the ache of lost things washes me away?  Or will I simply wither and self-destruct?

I was holding this question in my hands last night as I leaned on a sea wall and watched the evening tide.

That’s another handy John label, of course. I go so often to tidal images, it’s become one of my “things.”  

In truth, the tide is actually one of a gazillion places… or bits of places… fragments… shards of revelation… that ignite inside me when I encounter them. It’s rivers, churning. It’s breeze rippling over carpets of fern. It’s driftwood fugitives from distant shores. It’s skies and stories being stirred together. It’s the place that seems to find me when things get really desperate – 

a coastal place, written in ripply handwriting across a painted shore.

It’s a place that somehow sums up so much of the stuff I am feeling as the gauges split and the furnace boils over. 

If someone asks me: “So how you doing?” 

I don’t wanna just say: “Fine.”  Not today.

No, today I wanna beam them down to a beach, where we can watch each other through the crazy window… or perhaps even touch as the water dissolves the darkly enchanted glass.

I want to let the tide say what I can’t right now. Sometimes I honestly believe this is the real reason it is here…

to reach into all those worlds behind my eyes and lap up their shores, to stir the shells from distant stars and to ask the impossible question one more time before the windowless night sky steals the answer.

I am not an ocean, any more than I am a starship reclaiming the possibilities of new worlds in a moonbeam, or a dragon weaving its scales over the stony loom of a river. I am not an ocean, any more than I am a warrior or a survivor or an overcomer or a beacon of resilience.

But I am John, and the tide still gives me stories that no other ocean will touch.