I’m not going to lie. This last week has been a bit of a bear. The emotional lows and highs, the stress and worry have been compiling. All of it, building up blocks to my creative mind. I spent three hours in a car yesterday staring out of the window, unable to put words to paper or even to reshape my work in progress. I couldn’t see out behind the wall of self-doubt and defeat.

So I’m here, trying to bang my head against the keys and make some sort of poetry come out to assuage my weekly quota, but all I really want to do is crawl back into bed and forget that I ever had words to say. That’s how the muddle of depression hits people sometimes. It’s not always tears and fainting dramatically across couches… sometimes it’s just the stagnant stare across a rolling landscape trying to recuperate what was lost.

So for today, and I hope you’ll forgive me the rough outline and nature of it, this is what I’ve got. Thanks for sticking with me, thanks for reading my words, even when they come in stuttering, halting steps. I have to believe that it will get better. It has to get better.

 

The Place

 

There is a place somewhere that lost you.

Took you

Shattered the universe you were

And glued back the leftover branches and brick brack

Into jagged and hurt lines.

 

I cannot replace the one-of-a-kind soul,

And I cannot repair the jumbled carnage.

Because there are pieces still lost

Out there, in that place.

 

And I try to understand what’s gone wrong,

A puzzle to reassemble

Find the edges first and work in to your center.

Separate it out by sky and earth.

But the colors mute into all one gray.

And none of them fit quite right.

 

There is a place, a moment in time,

When the swirling wonder of light 

Faded into a dying star, 

A pile of poorly cut cardboard, 

A disassembled soul, sitting stagnant

In that place.