Breakdown

I resolve not to post anymore poem drafts. They reveal the raw and chaotic inside of the creative process. It isn't pretty though the inspiration is able to keep me moving through the muck and flaws of physicality, of humanness, of flacid, first attempts at language. This is why I haven't posted though I write every day. I'd rather work something through until it shines. So I suppose I could loop back and post the cleanest rewrites. Mostly I haven't been very satisfied with the poetry or much of my writing. I am in that state between states in the creative imagination. How do I get from stomp dance to this island, through strands of jazz, blues and heartbreak ballad? How do I negotiate sacred thinking with the rhetoric and guns of a president who has announced he's going to build a fence along the border? How do I find "the" story from all of those who are vying for attention?

I'm in the middle of a break down that carries similar elements as the first, when I was a painting student at the University of New Mexico in my early twenties. It was dusk at the height of going-home-from work traffic and I was crossing the street as I had crossed the street for thousands of times. I couldn't. I hung onto the narrow island of dirt, weeds and a little grass as if I were going to die. I couldn't go backwards or forwards. Eventually I had to think myself across the street. And had to will each step the nearly-mile home. I couldn't swallow. Those muscles wired to panic. And panic was attached by live wires to chaos.

I did not have the luxury of a breakdown. I had small children, a job and classes. So I thought myself through each small increment of movement, otherwise I would topple. When I took the wheel of a car I had to fight for control so I would not drive off the road.

This time was marked by being banned from my mother's house because I named my stepfather a terrorist. My daughter's father was alternately binge drinking, writing beautiful and necessary poetry and political treatises and collecting hippie-girl lovers. It was also marked by extreme creativity. I began the path of poetry. I began the end of painting.

Chaos. This is a different layer of the spiral. The elements are here. Some aspects have diminished, like the panic.

Each morning I ask for a blessing by the sun. I am keep my eyes and heart open. I see the journey for what it is--the complicated layers of time and memory pulse. I go out and ask the workers to turn the radio to the level below "blasting", which they do. I resolve to add another vignette, even a page, to the growing story and resolve to finish a song for my cousin Tiger who's in the hospital here for diabetic complications, complications that I believe have been complicated by handfuls of pills and drugs. And no sunlight, and hospital food with no live elements.

This is it. No sex, violence or hip hop, a few drugs (see above).