Posts Tagged ‘modern soliloquy’

I’m sorry if I ever shamed you for your emotions.

Did I, or did I simply say what was true?

The other day you yourself said you cry-laugh, and I’ve seen you do it — snot and not, triggered, then bravely out-riggered. 

Its not that unattractive. In fact it’s actually beautiful  — a kind of moistured sentience, a textured perceiving — an emo-glow right in the pupils. 

People have always vilified the emotional extremes —  or worshiped them: silence, yelling, sulking, telling. 

But with you I don’t think of it like that. 

You fluctuate, beautifully, like a lighthouse, like a human being, being. You experience what we all do  — but compacted, intense — like an espresso machine drooling crema from a double-shot portafilter. 

You are acutely and emotively valid, affectional, certified by the heart, authenticated by the amygdalae, bona fide, good faith, unfaked, affectowoobly, then sure-footed. 

You are for all of us who know you well our own special emotional banquet. 

I think of you as my feeling friend, an affective millionaire, an emotive genius — undone, super fun, on the run, heart flung. 

Please keep doing this — feeling —  and of course you will, and I will too, and everyone else — blushing, gushing, singing, adjusting, anything but stuffing it, and hushing yourself or anyone else up too much. 

Do this — do anything but dodge the central nervous system, or quell it. Do anything but deny, shrivel or flatten your emotions.  

Do this. Do what you do best — rise, summit; dive, plummet; roar, soar. 

And then finally, always remember that I love you, all of you, and in doing so I love myself, and all of us — all living, reacting, trembling, responding things, the earth’s shuddering skin bags of weeping and whooping, all gorgeous fragile, feeling things. 

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Cluck — then duck.

And there, in that dark park — shark and spark — mark, their responses.

Oh the powerful, how they bluster, hulk, sulk and skulk when exposed. And if they can’t deny it, they mouth crafty-drafty-daffy apologies.

I hate it!

I asked you, “Why?”

“Why do you think that even after you complained, he or she or they or Ray — his supervisor or even, say HR — did nothing?”

You weren’t sure why; I wasn’t either.

Systemic evil, personal stupidity, good-old-boy culture, a bark beetle, a comet, tormented egos, black holes, massive incompetence, weakness of character, fleas — money?

We couldn’t sort it out.

Think about it, all the complaints lodged all over the world — then dodged. It’s maddening!

You do the same job as he does and get paid less? Really?

You are assigned work that isn’t even in your job description? Are you kidding me?

He said, what?

Smut!

He touched you inappropriately?

My God!

He sexually assaulted you?

Ugg!

The thug!

The sick creep!

Hell!

Go tell — in order to get well!

Yes, I can see that, and I’m so sorry!

It is horribly and terrifyingly humiliating! But to not tell — that’s devastating!

Prepare yourself. Do it. Of course there will be the denial. the revile, in the aisle, the social media pretrial, the counter attack and threat to sack.

But, keep this clearly in front of you:

Secrets perpetuate sicknesses.

For there within the sinister silence of relational violence oozes the foul psychic puss of false shame and self-blame, a suppurating sepsis of misapplied guilt and a fetid, festering biotoxin of furious fear mingled with ferocious anger.

My God girl!

The organizationally administered inflammagens are virtually dripping out of the open crack at the base of your skull, running off the tip of one of your shoulder blades and bio-trailing you along the office floor.

This cannot continue.

I want you well.

I want you healed.

I want you empowered.

I want you vindicated!

Therefore, fill the hall, and tell it all!

Make the complaint, lodge the grievance, file the paperwork, notify the press, call a conference, sue their asses off! Trap the fly, smack down the lie, out the tie, exposify — him, and hem and them!

This much is certain. We must not go on without you speaking up.

I’m standing with you.

Pellmell, raise hell, go tell!

I am shell-shocked by the sheer hit and hellish hack of human hurt.

Our poor fragile bodies —

These gorgonized, agonized and amplified mélanges of terrified imperfection.

They break, they ache, they bake.

And yet …

To even have a body.

To even move through space and time.

To think and feel, to be alive,

To eat and laugh and love, to lose and gain again.

This, just this,

This contextualized semi-fixity of bodily permanence.

This gorgeous dire-defended-dangling sentience.

This good-sick, savory-bland, sensuous-torturous, bright-dark vivacity.

This brief, brilliant, barreling, biting dash through the thin air of our spinning, sun-smacked, rain-dashed, poxed and rashed blue planet,

This living this of this and this and this.

Ahhhhh, I love this gift of zing and zap and zest.

To lean and tilt and rise and soar.

To breathe, to see, to weigh, to choose.

To be completely and severally existable within the grace-filled, love-packed, picked and wrapped resistible.

Ah and ah and ah,

I love this life paced out within the imperfect-wonderful, immediate-possible of the material miracle.

Speak up more, not less, using your own ideo-vocalized mess.

Soliloquy  — in front of yourself and everyone else-a-melse.

Monologue, dog!

You and I can flip-flop nonstop lolly pop but that gets trite fast and then we just so need to speak our favor-ite verbo-bite.

Bebop, hiphop, tipitity-top, slop-a-pop.

Ski-ba-bop-ba-bop-voc; do that thang nonstop.

Be-cause …

We have been flattened by the road-grade blade of the prepaid lexicographers.

We have been run over by the top-botched, pop-a-voc.

We have suffered weak-a-squeak.

We have sold out for safety and we have shut up way too much because we thought we were stuck-a-muck with duck and cluck.

Nope! Fess; you’ve got that vocable mess!

Unperson; you’ll worsen, but word-dive and jivity jive and you’ll revive.

See!

Be inventy.

Sync with your blink.

Que with your you and do-ba-de-do!

I sit with my latte, and my shredded wheat, my clover honey and my almond milk and discuss the hoped-for future with my bathrobed, hair-tousled, coffee-sipping wonder-wife.

We musify in the morning.

We do the back-and-forthification — which is fun — but reality keeps getting tossed into the mix, and it doesn’t always cooperate — thus there is precarity in the plans.

It is stirred into the plenty.

The sun comes up, we go to work, the day gears up, the stock market goes up, our hopes rise, fueled by interest rates and dark, rich caffeine, and then the turn, as we weary through the late morning, early afternoon, the long commute home.

The sun slants, time slumps, life leaks and floats back to the floor like a post-party balloon — precarity. Thus and so, we are temporaria  — even the wise ones, even the prescient. As the scripture says, we live move and have our being within the precariat.

Did you think it said something else?

Hatreds, hopes, happenstances; genetics, genies, jerks; accidents, illnesses, taxes — all these and more, the various and sundry vagaries and variances of any given era — these insure membership in the precariat.

Oh, life!

And yet, and yet — the persistent goodness.

I am struck always by the presistant plenty, the living-loveliness of life amidst the persistently pandemic poverties. The ghastly demons of not shirk and faint at the edges of exuberant gardens, lined with white roses.

Last week we put up an beautiful, rod iron, arched trellis at the church. And below it, we planted a passion vine.

Thus there is hope, for vine, flowers, butterflies, tendrils, the reach upward, the stunning beauty, all-passion, the inspired community.

I am shock-smitten by such improvements, everyday, constantly, the preciosities of nature — love, babies, brains, branches of community, friends, finials, finitude, infinity.

The precosities — they just keep gobbling up the precarities.

We wake up together; our fluffy black cats are at the foot of the bed.

We get up and begin the day with strong, brown coffee in white mugs.

We sit on the couch; we watch each other. My eyes are on the completely particularized universal of you — your dark brown eyes, your gold streaked hair, your red and yellow cheeks, the soft contours of your essential orange.

We talk. We discuss the bright blue weather, our deep purple daughters, our investments, the upcoming week, the cats.

We go off to work. Quickly we come home again to each other. We talk about the day. Then you are sewing. Then I am writing. Then we are making dinner. Then we are luxuriating within the warm hum, sum and jume-da-jume of our intimate, red and yellow domesticity.

The whir of your machine, the click of my keyboard, the slosh of our washing machine (our clothes stirring together) the clink of our double boiler on the stove, steaming our dinner greens — this is you and me particularly, essentially artistically.

I am Chagall; you are my Bella.

You take my hand, we waft through the house, we lift from the floor and fly to the ceiling. I sit on your shoulders, you rest your head against my arm.

You most colorful, touchable, breathable specific; you minute blue particulate within the concrete bon vivant of my purple affection.

There you go, but here you are again.

You overtake me by degrees — your green lips pressed against mine immediately follow your tan arms wrapped around me always follow your orange smile coming in the door.

You spearmint breath, you green tea scent, you chai-tea warmth — you delicious Chardonnay, you perfectly hoppy IPA, you unambiguously welcome dark chocolate thing!

You are no idealized, disembodied, romanticized you. Your pink head floats past my blue hair. You are my most definite palpability. I taste your sweet lime tangibility.

We sleep, work, eat, laugh and drink connected. We are the perpetual state of met, mixed, melded, merged — mused.

I turn my face to kiss you, our red  hot lips touch, I put my hand on your purple waist, you hold my yellow head lightly, we float past the children, the cats look up.

The couch, the lamp and the TV tip over and fall out of the front window into the bright red Pacific Ocean.

I am here with you.

You are completely palpable; this makes us, “Oh, so magical!”

The very brave fear greatly, then they charge!

They run at the very thing that scares them near death.

Unemployed? They screw their courage to a job board. Winless? They ride in the Tour de France clean. Broke? They tighten their money belt and pay their bills.

While cowards cheat; the brave go out and compete — alone if they must, in an open sea, in a storm, lost! When the waves breach the deck and no one comes to help. they lash down the watery hatches, set the slashing sails to full and take the spinning wheel.

They fail, miserably and try again.

And in their inner sanctuaries, those sad and fearful cloistered rooms inside, the brave brook no tart heart. They do not blame someone else, nor go begging for sympathy, nor rot with resentment, regret and rancorous refrain when all seems lost.

We all suffer; the courageous simply weep in a corner more quietly. Cowards and valiants both die many times before their deaths; the valiants simply break out of their graves and flush their sorry corpses out into the open again faster.

And in the end, bravery dies well, giving the final gift with gritted teeth and class. Lamed, the courageous run hard down the stretch toward the final pole vault.

Gush, then hush!
 
But there is so much to touch, in me and about you, so much angry red and such a sad, sad blue!
 
That’s so, but …
 
I have also noticed how the word throng bumps so Alice-In-Wonderland along, and how going on too long makes the speech so freakin’ Mad Hatter wrong, and how the rude riot against a healthy diet of quiet is not what anyone wants or needs.
 
What do we then do with our mad-dog word entourage and our thug-mug emotional devotional, with thoughts so far up the mentally unstable cliff that we are worn out from rappelling back down?
 
Well, how about if we just shut up?
 
It’s a thought …
 
You’ve seen how a verbose win, an armed and fired verbal din undoes within — and without.
 
Prattle, prattle, rock and rattle; tattle, tattle — it’s a custody battle. Hoarse, hoarse, remorse, remorse; of course, of course it’s a screamin’ divorce!
 
There is a zephyr, a cool, soft wind that blow through the mind when it stops talking …
 
We want that.We want more of that soft mental breeze, fragrant with reason, empathy and understanding, the one that wafts into the mind when it is still, the one that blows on the precipice and carries the cliff swallow up into the beautiful, quiet sky.

That’s so fine!

Those sky-high heels, this super cool collar, that roguish, rakish rag and Jag! Mistress Fashion is still struttin’ her clothes and her cars.

That roof line, this cutline, those wheels, that set of fancy lights!

Fashion — the Romans slammed it, the church fathers denounced it, Shakespeare called it a “deformed thief” and the middle class persists in wearing cheap t-shirts and faded shorts on airplanes, but Paris, New York, and Detroit aren’t out of business yet.

Cap, cuff and console sell well. What’s sheer, shiny or smooth — Coco’s little black dress, Coach’s handbag,Tiffany’s diamonds, BMW coupes — they catch the cash.

Those fashionistas, how they shell out, and how they suffer. The steel-caged crinoline, the stumach crushing corset, foot binding, ear gauging, starved runway models, big monthly car payments — they all took and take the punch and pouch!

But whatever the pang, if its the thang — Cha-Chang!

The 1959 Cadillac defied reason — and sold. That bloated sheet metal whale of chrome and swoop and fin — it was an Eldorado!

Mr. George Washington himself liked to cruise his gardens in his cool two-wheeled riding chair and shop in new cities for new ribbons — for his hair.

That cute quiff, this adorable quaff, that stylin’ quff — we just cannot live without them!

“No” has a happy home in every wise brain.

What gifts, what endowments, what freakishly fine talents would have been kept from the world without a no to the cheapskate, the naysayer and the lazy bim, bam and bum within.

What successful child ever grew up without no, and the child who was never told no, never grew up.

What dieters ever thinned down or up without no to the sweet whining, seductive call of cake or cookie or calorie?

Which of the bent, twisted, cracked, crumbled, conflicted minds that ever breathed oxygen avoided the penalty box, the ticket, the firing, the expulsion, the drugs, the alcohol, the jail or the prison except by a few stern self-inflicted no’s.

No is needed, a lot, but not just no.

There is more to life than just no. Look around the edge or over the top of every high, thorned, hedged and conventional no, and you’ll see a lovely, nubile, winged, bright, book-toting yes looking right at you.

Run towards that yes yelling and waving. Yell, “Yes, I can! Yes, I will! Yes, I do!” For it is that very yes that has the power to replace old addictions, discover new habits, heal relational wounds and inspire fresh contributions to all the fine arts and the fine sciences.

For within each and every spoken yes there is restored memory, perspicacious reason and a super-gorgeous winged thing of imagination.

Don’t you know that every pen, poem, piece, pan, paper, piper, pean, pastry, panacea or panel ever pieced together has a joyful-howling pack of yes’s pursuing it?

No may be that mangy dog that must have its dutiful, flea-dipped day, but yes, drop-dead gorgeous yes, will drive the sports car with the top down, write the poem, paint the picture, eat the chocolate cake, kiss the fluffy cat, refinish the wood floor and host the latest, flipped over, hip-pity hop, hop, hop bop.

So feed that! Smack that! Yes, jump on that –everyday! Close your eyes and fold your hands and put your heels together and yes your own fresh yes five times a day. Eat it up and go back for seconds and then have a dollop of yes on top of your best yes, for dessert.

The yes within the yes of your own, sweet, self-affirming yes is your best inner guest.

No is fine in its time, but wise souls always fly the furious flag of yes just before charging right over the top of a no longer helpful no.