For My Unwritten Poems

I write a poem for my unwritten poems,
for those that lie still in the rigid rest of nothingness,
as in the rest of reason—unemerged ideas.

How good the word is that has not yet been pronounced,
growing to its maturity in beds of silence
like the corn kernel in the field. 
Tomorrow perhaps the sun will crawl out
from the wind-swept, snowed-in heights,
and the seed
and the word
will rise into the blossoming beauty
of visible being.
Tomorrow perhaps there will be pain in the renewed white heat
of spring’s ascent towards bloom.

How good the kernel is,
that hibernates through years’ becoming
in the peace of its own essence,
beneath the earth,
like the bear after months of sleep— 
waiting, expecting
to awaken. 

Itshe Slutsky 

On awakening let us think about the twenty-four hours ahead. We consider our plans for the day. Before we begin, we ask God to direct our thinking, especially asking that it be divorced from self-pity, dishonest or self-seeking motives. Under these conditions we can employ our mental faculties with assurance, for after all God gave us brains to use. Our thought-life will be placed on a much higher plane when our thinking is cleared of wrong motives.

In thinking about our day we may face indecision. We may not be able to determine which course to take. Here we ask God for inspiration, an intuitive thought or a decision. We relax and take it easy. We don't struggle. We are often surprised how the right answers come after we have tried this for a while.

We usually conclude the period of meditation with a prayer that we be shown all through the day what our next step is to be, that we be given whatever we need to take care of such problems. We ask especially for freedom from self-will, and are careful to make no request for ourselves only. We may ask for ourselves, however, if others will be helped. We are careful never to pray for our own selfish ends. Many of us have wasted a lot of time doing that and it doesn't work. You can easily see why.

"God, I offer myself to Thee -- to build with me and to do with me as Thou wilt. Relieve me of the bondage of self, that I may better do Thy will. Take away my difficulties, that victory over them may bear witness to those I would help of Thy Power, Thy Love, and Thy Way of life. May I do Thy will always! 

Lord, make me a channel of thy peace,
that where there is hatred, I may bring love;
that where there is wrong, I may bring the spirit of forgiveness; 
that where there is discord, I may bring harmony; 
that where there is error, I may bring truth; 
that where there is doubt, I may bring faith;
that where there is despair, I may bring hope; 
that where there are shadows, I may bring light; 
that where there is sadness, I may bring joy. 

Lord, grant that I may seek rather to comfort than to be comforted; 
to understand, than to be understood; 
to love, than to be loved. 
For it is by self-forgetting that one finds. 
It is by forgiving that one is forgiven.
It is by dying that one awakens to Eternal Life.

My Creator, I am now willing that you should have all of me, good and bad. I pray that you now remove from me every single defect of character which stands in the way of my usefulness to you and my fellows. Grant me strength, as I go out from here, to do your bidding. Amen.

 

Have you ever considered your part in our story? What you did  and why I didn’t choose you or want to be with you? What self respecting woman, or in my case, teenage girl, would choose to invest her heart and her belief in someone who wouldn’t even wake up to go to class in the morning? I was a 16 year old wounded time bomb, fresh off a suicide attempt, who’d been thru more trauma than any person should have to endure in a life, much less by that age, and even I still tried to go to class. I had to leave Hyde Park before 7am to drive up to the very end of LSD to make it to my high school in West Rogers Park, and you complained about me taking your car, so I could make it to school? You’ve been blaming me and allowing your family to blame me too, for all kinds of asinine shit for so long, you’ve forgotten what it means to accept responsibility for your own self destructive choices during a rough time in your young adulthood. I suppose blaming me was easier than owning up to your part in things. so of course you don’t remember the way I tried to encourage you to go to class, of course you don’t remember anything loving or supportive about me…but that’s ok bc it’s been over thirty five years, dude. 

do you have any idea how fucking absurd it is that you still try to make yourself the victim in our story? You could’ve been thrown in jail for statuary rape for fucks sake, how’s that for a hard fact? I was technically a minor. A wounded teenage minor whom you knew was fresh off a suicide attempt and still IN HIGH SCHOOL. Did you think I was gonna marry you when I was 16 while you weren’t even responsible enough to go to class? how the fuck did you think we were gonna survive? What a crock of bullshit you’ve been spewing as though I did anything to you beyond not choosing you. And the worst part about it is, you never even tried to show me a healthier version of yourself so I could choose you. But you have such a high opinion of yourself that you never considered that you weren’t anything close to worthy of me and your actions over the last thirty five plus years have revealed who you truly are, and I was totally right not to choose you. (I’ve never wished myself upon anyone I truly love bc I’ve been way too fucked up and I never wanted to be a part of a relationship unless I could give my A game and my best self.) But we’re very different people and our values are completely incompatible, so it’s a good thing we didn’t end up together. Despite all the slanderous shit you've been slinging, all I’ve ever wanted for you is to be your best self. To be happy and fulfilled in your life. I’ve never talked shit about you or denigrated you to anyone behind your back, but  all the while, you’ve been saying all kinds of inappropriate, violating things to try to paint me into some villainous character, when in fact, it’s you who’ve been the villain in our story. Crossing all kinds of boundaries, investigating my life, attempting to dig up sordid details, hoping to find anything to validate your theory that I’m a bipolar fuck up, who clearly doesn't deserve compassion bc she rejected you when she was sixteen.  No accountability on your part for the fact that you weren’t living up to anything close to your own standards, much less mine. 

I wonder if you've ever had the depth of character to consider if you would want your daughter to be with a man like you? Who was behaving like you were back then. What would you do to a man who did to your daughter what you've done to me all these years? If only my father was alive to lend some perspective on what his daughter deserves in a partner. You have many wonderful gifts, and I've missed your voice and insights very much thru these years of silence between us, but I won’t play pretend with you and attempt to placate your fragile ego about your shortcomings. You've been a dick to the absolute max and it's too bad you don't get it about yourself.

And btw, you do know you are a raging ego maniac, right? I don’t know who you are in your actual life, but you’re a diabolical fuck in mine. I don’t have to play pretend bc I have your emails and messages from years back. I don’t need to lie about the times we met for drinks at Danny’s and beyond, or our long drives, or my first taste of Jim’s, which I loved, btw, or anything else we’ve done thru the years. I’m not the one who was deceiving anyone, that was you. I have lots of reasons to be furious at you for the way you’ve tried to poison people against me, as though exposing me as Wendy or anything else was some heroic act of valor instead of a pathetic ploy to quite literally turn people against me at the dog park like we're in high school and not our fifties. You just couldn't leave well enough alone and live peacefully and respectfully at a distance. But I don’t care about the sheeple part of it bc anyone who was swayed by your antics wasn't worth my attention anyway. What I do care about is how malicious you’ve become. It makes me sad that you allow yourself to be so small. That you've become a man who says such awful things about your own flesh and blood with no filter to other people with no filter. There's no hyung in you. The light I used to love in you, the love and care and kindness that made me choose to be with you during a vulnerable time in my life, is so far removed from the man you've become. I don't have a clue who you are anymore and I guess it's just as well bc I don't like this version of you. It seems you're in perfect company with your chosen partner and you clearly deserve each other.  

Anyway, I’ve started to write this yuck out of my head and heart in these preliminary vignettes. Too much suppressed hurt, anger, and resentment has been festering and I need to release decades of bilious corroded funk thru these exercises in courage and candor. I know my writing is rough as fuck but Im not gonna let my pride thwart my progress. I haven’t been able to string a sentence together for over ten years for fear of finally being honest and exposing my true self to mean people like you, but fuck it, I’ve gotta start somewhere, right? I'll keep journalling out loud and continue to detoxify myself until I flow clearly and authentically. No more compromising my healing or well being...

I’m sorry I hurt you when I was a teenager. I wish I w/could’ve been more emotionally responsible back then but I was still a child who was nursing my own wounds and trying to make sense of my complex reality. I was not ready to commit to anything serious at sixteen, and neither were you in your early twenties.

I hope you find a way to adjust your perspective and see your realistic part in things. It may help you to see clearly and understand who the actual heartbreaker is in our story.  

Meta 

The feel of a much needed hug in a moment of sorrow

An unexpected helping hand from the stranger

The curl of the tiniest of fingers wrapped trustingly around your own

A gentle breeze on the cusp of Autumn

And the way a leaf  flies against it

The acrid scent of dying sugar maple

Hurried against an ombre October sunset

How the moon fills the sky

And lights a child’s face when she sees it

The way giggles sound sweeter when hurled against the din

Of a tide rising at their feet

The curious curl of a mustached lip smiling across the Metro

The extended hand on the crowded, too fast jitney

The arms carrying the wounded

And the hearts carrying their prayers

The church bell in the distance

And the train whistle calling memory home

All the tender places we land

In our journeys

Glances that smile

Whispers that remind you

Touches that feather sweetness

Compassion and care

These moments

When life unfurls sorrows

Yields weariness

Beckons the best of us

Burrows to the core

Sways in endless fields of  blossoms

You are the wind, the leaf, the tree

You are the raging ocean inviting giggles

You are the blessed setting sun

Ablaze in fiery colors

You are the hum of  home and the traveler

You are the dying and the giver of  Life

You are the sun and the moon and the stars

You are the promise that moves mountains

You are all that is good and loving and kind

You are Life and Life Everlasting

I AM You and You are Me

We are one unto each other

We are the Thing unto Itself

Rev. Robin G. Wright

Knucklehead Learns a New Word

I'm sorry it wasn't till the end of the year

that I asked you to write about yourselves.

 

You filled pages in May and June, my arm

and wrist were sore from writing

wow and oh my goodness in the margins

 

as you shared stories from your lives,

about the times you fell in love

or lost somebody or learned to ride a bike.

 

And so many of you wrote about your mothers

as so many of the boys and girls I've taught since

have written about their mothers.

 

To my mother, for my mother. I've read these words

over and over for fifteen years and still

they move me. And that year, my first

 

time craning my neck to read them, I didn't

understand how holy it was, what I was doing,

holier than the masses I attended

 

at the mission, than the confessions I made or the readings

I assigned you: Dante and the Bible and Huckleberry Finn.

I wasted so many words and days, bleeding

 

the clock down, forcing your silence. When you broke it,

Ay Maestro! You would say. Tell us something new.

Now I can't remember anything I said. I remember

 

it felt strange not to know what word would come

next. I remember thinking I did not like

letting go control.

 

And on the radios blasting as I walked home I heard

Pasame la botella and you singing along

 

Voy a beber en nombre de ella

and whizzing by me too on the bikes

 

you'd long since learned to ride.

Ay Maestro! Ay Dante! you'd call out,

 

A smile and a laugh at my nickname

but yes, even the snicker's a grace, I realize now.

 

I don't have the yearbook anymore from '05-'06

but I bet some of you do, some of you

 

were on student council, right?

Put us back in touch.

 

I want more than regret

for my first seven months as your teacher,

 

want more than the cliché—you gave me

more than I gave you—that's not enough

 

though it's certainly true. There's another,

maybe better: Words can travel a thousand miles.

 

And what I'm thinking about now

is the 5 or 10 or 20

 

your mothers traveled for our first

parent teacher conferences. How nervous

 

I was, and did not know yet

how much you loved them.

 

For the Spanish speaking I knew enough

to say es un privilegio a enseñar

 

a su hijo. It is a privilege

to teach your son.

 

Even then, slow as I was to see

how holy it all was,

 

I saw that. Privilegio. I say it still

in Spanish that hasn't got much better,

 

to parents of boys and girls

who speak that tongue. Es un privilegio.

 

Privilegio. PRIV - IL - LAY - HEE - OH.

the word lighter in Spanish than English,

 

floating through tongue and teeth.

I learned it, among many other things,

 

my first year, with you.

Zach Czaia