Category: Poems {Going Quietly Sane}

I am Underground

1/12/09

I guess I’ll make my poetry public again.

12/18, 2008

My poetry has gone underground for a while.  I have said some things, and written some things, that have hurt people I love.  I don’t want to be culpable, but I am.  So it’s put away in a “drawer” for a season.

But here’s one called Hum, by Ann Lauterbach.

The days are beautiful

The days are beautiful.

I know what days are.

The other is weather.

I know what weather is.

The days are beautiful.

Things are incidental.

Someone is weeping.

I weep for the incidental.

The days are beautiful.

Where is tomorrow?

Everyone will weep.

Tomorrow was yesterday.

The days are beautiful.

Tomorrow was yesterday.

Today is weather.

The sound of the weather

Is everyone weeping.

Everyone is incidental.

Everyone weeps.

The tears of today

Will put out tomorrow.

The rain is ashes.

The days are beautiful.

The rain falls down.

The sound is falling.

The sky is a cloud.

The days are beautiful.

The sky is dust.

The weather is yesterday.

The weather is yesterday.

The sound is weeping.

What is this dust?

The weather is nothing.

The days are beautiful.

The towers are yesterday.

The towers are incidental.

What are these ashes?

Here is the hate

That does not travel.

Here is the robe

That smells of the night

Here are the words

Retired to their books

Here are the stones

Loosed from their settings

Here is the bridge

Over the water

Here is the place

Where the sun came up

Here is a season

Dry in the fireplace.

Here are the ashes.

The days are beautiful.

Ann Lauterbach is the author of five collections of poetry: If in Time: Selected Poems 1975-2000 (Penguin, 2001), On a Stair (1997), And for Example (1994), Clamor (1991), Before Recollection (1987), and Many Times, but Then
(1979). She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation,the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine C.
MacArthur Foundation. Since 1991 she has taught at Bard College, where she is David and Ruth Schwab III Professor of Language and Literature
and co-directs the Writing Division of the M.F.A. program.

Fragmented

It is not good to get in this mood.

I am dangerous.
I hurt others. I hurt myself.
I have no words, a heart full of gravel.
I will retreat,  for now.
I will search out the truth.
I have been called needy. Manipulative.
It is too much to face.
For now I will retreat. Reseal my heart, so that
I cannot hurt or be hurt.
I know this is fragmented truth, but for now
it is all I have.

11-26-2008

…

11-19-2008

Recently, I wrote a poem about what it feels like to be an alcoholic. — How quitting has impacted some of my friendships, basically what it feels like to me. In retrospect, I realize that I have caused pain to those people that I care deeply about. I regret that more than anything. It’s the tension in creative expression. Mine is always visceral and a bit viral. But if one ‘watches their words’ can they create? I guess I’ll live with the tension today and sit here a feel my extreme sadness over the pain I have caused.

Life Long Yearning

dead
Image by M e l o d y via Flickr

The galactic hole in my heart

makes me tired of holding all the pieces together.

Tired of doubting.

Tired of needing.  Wishing.  Hurting.

Crying out in all the ways that speak of your neglect.

All my life, Daddy, learning

that I am incomplete.

So I gorge on all the things that don’t fill.

Wishing for love that never came.

All my life, yearning for the hurt to stop.

That I would not billow in space without

an anchor.

I want more. I need more.

I wish.  I hurt

and long

and cry

for love and finally, I find it at the Cross.

At peace I lay down my life long yearning.

I am home.

updated March 2, 2010

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Dreams.

I had the strangest dream last night.  I woke up believing that my Dad had just died. In my dream I received a phone call saying: “Your father just passed away.”  And I was so confused.  I couldn’t figure out what the woman on the other end of the phone was talking about.

I kept thinking Dad just died?  That means he’s been alone all these years. I felt so sad.  Because I didn’t know that he was still alive, somewhere, sick and alone.

I still feel sad, though I know that it isn’t true, it is like I’m losing him all over again.

What does this dream say about me?

My dad has been gone, dead, for five and a half years.  He started showing signs that something was wrong right about this time of year; my mom and dad had just paid us a visit.  It wasn’t a particularly good visit. He was on his laptop the whole time. And he was acting really strange during that trip.  Grumpy, even angry and even at times mean. (More than usual people!)

And then he was actually diagnosed with the brain tumors, Dec. 1st, 03.

It’s amazing how a dream, no matter how untrue it is, can linger with you. It sits with you like a stomach ache. All day today, I couldn’t shake this sad feeling that Dad has been alone for the last five years — sick and alone — and I didn’t know.

Weird.

It’s Lonely Here on the Wagon

So I quit drinking a while ago.
It was the right decision, for me.
I am addicted. I am
an alcoholic.
I never expected it to be easy; or for life to remain static.
As I see it, I am more present; I am more awake
than I have been in years.
Don’t get me wrong
I — have — hard — days;
Days when stress makes my brain, heart, and thirst buds scream.
I have days when I want to make it all go away!
This is sometimes why
I drank in the first place.
But the more difficult thing, surprisingly,
has been — from — time –  to –  time
I am lonely. And I face,
my old friends are gone
because I drank too much.
And my new friends are gone
because I don’t.
I wasn’t a happy drunk
nor was I particularly sad.
I was sometimes quiet.
I know people who got really loud,
and others overtly friendly, even one
who used to cry.
But now I see drinking, apparently,
didn’t make me ‘fun’ (enough.)
Those people that I gathered with, who seemed
to accept me as one of them;
It must have been that I just didn’t get
in the way.
I was accepted,
because I was a hard drinker, amongst
h a r d  d r i n k e r s.  And now,
I am s o b e r and I feel alone.

Nothing rings louder than a s i l e n t phone;
an empty email box or when one remembers an annual party, uninvited.
We could throw the party, I could make the call, but I’ve tried over time,
and now I’m thinking, they wouldn’t come.

Today it’s an aching heart I deal with;
A feeling which once, ironically,
I would have drowned out with a friendly glass

(or two, or five) of Merlot; anything to forget
this
f e e l i n g.
I have to face it, I am alone in my choices. Alone,
with my memories,
of people I thought were friends.
I am a lot more interesting sober; but I guess not
more fun.

My drinking friendships seemed to have disappeared.
Though I would never have said they were
d r i n k i n g friends.
I thought they were …
Well,
to be honest I thought they were
just f r i e n d s.
You know that phrase that is said when an alcoholic starts drinking again?
She’s “fallen off the wagon.”
Well, all I can say is it’s awfully lonely,
here

on the wagon.

Melody Harrison Hanson
October 31, 2008

This is incomplete as a poem, but full of real issues and emotions.

I Am Destruction

I wake with the familiar headache.
Deeply tired.  My bones in protest.
Emotions already chafing; dazzling, fluorescent, raw. Ablaze.
Coffee the first panacea of the day.
Sip by sip, its power over me if not to heal, then to awaken.

Slowly flooded by familiar disappointment.
Weary, I begin to See myself.
I am Destruction.
I am Broken Promises wielding their power.
The surge of rage,  justified.
It hurts.
My body adjusting to an awareness
of this old enemy within.
Destruction’s impact yet unknown.
Fury toward the innocent who contribute to the chaos
of my life and toward, the hell inside.

10/27/08
by Melody Harrison Hanson

My father was addicted to his rage – he admitted that to me at the end of his life. He wielded it over our family in pathological ways that nearly destroyed my Mother, and at times I feel it in me to either consume me or destroy me. I fear, more than anything, the legacy of that rage in my life.  More than alcoholism, more than depression or even debilitating insecurity. Rage is the ultimate nemesis. The curse he left for the next generation; for me.

Going Quietly Sane

How hard can it be? Some days, too hard.

As you crawl back into bed, pleading with the universe,

To make it all disappear.

You can’t drink away your fear and so,

You choose sleep. It’s the only option,

When you must make your mind stop.

Furtive thoughts, disbelieving truths, you are

Just plain scared. And of what?

Your heart races from thinking too much.

Hands shaky. Breathing in, out. Counting down, 100, 99, …

To slow down your heart,

Your head whispers lies.

You lay there for an unknowable amount of time,

Moments lost forever.

Irretrievable.

Just Gone. And at a certain point you realize that

The panic that quietly stole your day — the lies

From the pit of your heart are untrue.

After incalculable hours lost, never to be retrieved

You get up. You paint your face,

Coif your hair.

You put on pink, the happy color,

The disguise. Just imagine yourself strong.

10/23/08 MHH

My Mother’s Love

My Mother’s love is like no other.
It affirms; its power is profound.
In my mother’s arms
the child in me feels safe.

My Mother’s love is like no other.
It wounds; its hold like a vice;
The power my Mother holds,
wounds the girl in me,
and strangles
the woman I will become.

My Mother’s love
holds the child in me
in a place I want to escape.
I am safe and yet
caught,
strangled by ancient, overgrown vines.

Who am I?
My
Mother’s
Love.

by Melody Hanson, 2004

I Fear the Pain of Wanting

Sometimes I want,
Want so hard I fear it will break me in two.
What I want hurts inside, not because
I can’t have it … but,
Because the wanting,
Waiting, anticipating fills me up so full that I know I will burst.
I explode with the knowledge of it.
The pain is liquid fear,
Need rushing through me, pulsing, crushing
Flooding into all that I know to be true.

Sometimes when I know, with certainty,
I just know that I cannot have what I want,
I fear the pain of wanting.
The empty place inside so full of longing.
I fear it because a longing that deep, that clear,
Will only hurt.
Hurt for so long that what I know, what is goodness and truth,
What will be there, with certainty continuously
Begins to take on a quality of something else.
Endless, my longing and my reality go on and on, intertwining.
Sometimes, when I think of what I want,
I hate myself.

Sometimes wanting is enough
To remind me that I am still alive.
But other times, wanting is enough to curl me up,
Curl me up into a tomb-like, cold, scary place
Where I am suffocated by my own
Wanting.

melody harrison hanson, june, 2007

The Place of Nowhere

I wish I were a drinker.
My thirst is an itching wound; an irritation, a constant need. My albatross.
It will remain; a heavy calling. Uncomfortable.  I long for satiation, even as I am arguing against it.
Ice cold, tart, sublime. It will fill me up. Cradling my heart,
that beats too fast;
I want the panic to recede, and so, for a moment I submit to its tender lies, so gently disguised.
The thirst of a drinker, remains. It calls to me. But it is not my calling.
It lies and tells me it is but a moment; infrequent, even good.
It utters frantic, believable thoughts. Yes, believable. You can. You want. You deserve. Your heart is dry as a bone.
Your need is great.
Lingering, it hangs like the moon in the daytime sky.
Calling, enticing, bewitching. A constant source of light.
Beautiful, as it lures me back to that place of forgetting.
I wish I were a drinker, because I will always thirst.
But then I remember what is so easily forgotten,
The lack.
The Emptiness.
The place of Nowhere.
Even still, I long for it.It caresses me, it lures.
The seduction of a drinker is constant.
10/17/08 MHH

Five and a half years I have known that I am an alcoholic – most of five, of which I was unable to face the truth. In that time I have studied the disease and I came to face with the truth that this thing,that is my albatross, although difficult is just that ‘a thing.’  And we all have Things. Mine, yes, is tragic at least to me.  I mean how pathetic that I can’t drink. I love drinking. I really do.  It’s fun. It’s is social. It brings people together. It’s ‘normal.’ Yup, those are the more subtle lies (for me).

Anyway, I guess I just need to say that although I have felt a great deal of shame, that is no longer true. Yes, alcohol had me it its grip, but no longer. I feel freer than ever in my life. And although it does call me, whispering in my ear, seductively at times, I just tell it to shut up! Seriously I am reduced to telling the Liar in my head to shut the fuck up!

I have been sober, since July 2008, and almost daily I remind myself that my life IS worth living —  covering up is weak, feelings are important, and most of all my children and husband need me!  May it always be so that I listen to that strength inside that help me shut out the lure of being a drinker.

Phantom Love

You can’t just say you love me. Love isn’t words.
Love is time — spent over the span of a life.
Words are a phantom love.

I can’t mend your hurting heart.
I don’t even know why I should try.
Empty, adrift. You are searching for something.
Crying out, and I hear you.
But I cannot help.

You can’t just say I’m sorry.

Love is known through a lifetime of being, searching, knowing.
Love is acceptance. Endurance. Forgiveness.
Each of these is evident — if you love.

What is it that I am to you?
Do you feel you cannot provide for me the things I crave?
I am fully aware and accepting, that I am the woman you both shaped over time.
Strong. Capable. Faithful.
Afraid. Careful. Wounded.

You don’t have to heal me, that task is all mine.
All you have to do is BE,
with me,
in my life.

You can’t just say you love me – show me, you don’t regret, that I am.

Show me.
Just be.
With me.

 

 

(May 21, 2008)