Reasons to Live
The assignment for the writing workshop Thursday night is to write about what we love, using the “toys” of poetry: line-breaks, rhythm, alliteration, assonance, internal rhyme. I’m ready:
Reasons to Live
wet loam and waist-high weeds breathe
on a Texas morning after a hard rain
turnip greens and pot likker soak into cornbread,
cream splays out over hot peach cobbler
aging lovers spoon to Cleo Laine and a sax
while leaf shadows dance on the bedroom wall
Carolina snow-melt tumbles over stream beds
in a shower of shell-pink mountain laurel blossoms
intense yellow dandelions fleck a lush green meadow
loud with crickets in the south of France
bougainvillea flings a spray of super-saturated
crimson over a blue tile wall in Guanajuato
a tabby cat in Georgia rolls on his back and arches
against the red earth, purring for a belly-rub
in wool socks and plaid pajamas, she strokes her
pregnant belly as snowflakes float past a street light
fat brown toes sink into the sand caressed by
the foam on a beach by the Indian Ocean
in an autumn fog, five silver geese
honk for the dawn in New Orleans
an old woman, arms aloft, dances to the beat
of a base drum in the ancient city of Braga
And at the other extreme, the prisoners asked me to bring my Rant on Violence, so I polished it up, cut it down, and this is how it goes:
Violence: a Rant
“Everything happens for a reason.”
“God never gives us anything we can’t handle.”
When I hear that comfortable, self-congratulatory, soft-thinking, head-up-the-ass bullshit, I taste the metal edge of violence in me. Inside my imploding head, I rage: people can’t always handle what comes to them. What about suicide? What about alcoholism and drug addiction? What about teenagers who cut themselves? What about young boys, still waiting for their testacles to drop, who join gangs and kill other young boys whose testacles haven’t yet dropped? What about my daughter, the fist of her heart closed tight with rage because her first mother died?
I have watched a woman hold her child, swollen-bellied and snot-nosed, eaten by worms, skin smeared with pellagra, as his little eyes glazed over and death moved into his brain. Tell me the reason for that. Tell me why whole families of people with AIDS are draped over tin toilet bowls, watching their lives drain out of them in a thin brown stream. Tell me why orphaned children in Johannesburg live in drain pipes and share concrete beds with rats. Tell me why mutilated bodies show up in Baghdad every day, why children grow up combing the dumps in Brazilian cities in search of food, and tell me what reason there could possibly be for the suffering in Darfur tonight.
I want to scream. Break things. Commit ferocious acts of violence on the comfortable bodies of people who use the belief that there is a reason for everything to justify passive lives of TV and overeating and mindless shopping. If God is in control, and God never gives anybody anything they can’t handle, then there is no reason to get up off the couch and find something to do about hunger, about the hungry minds of people in prison, about the poisoning of the planet by people who are greedy for the money they can make by turning petroleum into bottles for lotions nobody needs, lotions tested on animals that die writhing in agony. I can’t fix this. Do I imagine that if everyone else would just fucking wake up, if everyone else would discomfort themselves enough to notice what’s going on beyond the smiley faces and the pastel cartoon bunnies in thousands of emails saying “I need a hug,” the world could change?
I know that violence makes violence. I hold my violence in my two hands until the fire of my rage heats it to melting, returns it to the source from which it came: love. I love people who have committed suicide, people who are alcoholics, people who are sexually abused and people who have committed sexual abuse, people who are hungry, people who have AIDS, people who are imprisoned long after they have learned all they had to learn from that imprisonment. I’m angry because I love; I’m angry because I have not done enough.
I holler at myself: DO SOMETHING, even if it’s only to make peace where I am, to listen to my breath and be still, to make one peaceful footprint on the earth. In my violent rage I am just another asshole. We’re all one piece. I wish I could believe in the sweet slop that everything happens for a reason. But I can’t. I believe things happen for no reason at all. I believe nobody ever gets what they deserve. I want people to be kinder to each other. I want it so much that sometimes I would like to bang their heads against a wall till they wake up! bleeding. And then I am grateful for the fucking dumb-shits of the world, because they keep me humble. They help me to remember that I’m violent, just like them.
Tags: Texas, What does it mean?
Kendall
Fellow Traveler –
I stumbled-across your fascinating online diary this morning, and enjoyed reading your entry(s) very much.
Wow.
Just within the last few days (alone) I have
watched my emotional pendulum swing
all the way from one extreme to the other.
At times asking myself “Is there anything worthwhile left to exist-for?” . . . and at other times thinking “There’s so much else
‘out there’ ” . . .
Thanks for your insights, and honesty.
I will ‘bookmark’ your URL and return,
to re-read your existing entries and also to follow your progress.
Note: for me, “warmth” is an important criteria.
Steve
I will read this everyday for the rest of my life. I am reeling from your words and I want to reel everyday.