Our society worships entirely the wrong animal, venerating them and reducing others to ash.
The news recently devoted a good portion of the sports coverage to how much money certain sports figures were going to be paid for kicking a ball across a field. And this in a time when our jobs are dissolving, our society is being wrecked, our economy may be irrecoverable and certain industries will cease to exist en mass. Put simply, there will not be jobs to come back to folks but apparently we still need to pay these guys billions for their service to humanity?
I cannot understand how ANY society and how any of us can tolerate/accept a sports figure being paid anywhere NEAR that sum for what they do when those who really do jobs worth paying, are dying in droves because they are not receiving enough personal protective gear to protect themselves.
When did we start paying someone to kick a ball millions and a nurse who saves our life, hundreds?
What’s wrong with us?
If I were an alien observing our planet, I would seriously wonder if we all were crazy in our assessment of VALUE. What we value. What we do not. If nothing else, Covid-19 has given us a chance to see this once and for all and try to do something about it.
We have marched for Black Lives Matter during this time because it was over-due and our raw emotions on the subject burst out of their polite shell and filled the streets with ire and a desire for equality but how many of us really want equality? Not all of us that is for sure, look around and you can see it in every facet of life, a desire to be above someone else somehow.
We still routinely under-react and permit by our inaction, serious hideous crimes like rape to go unpunished in this country and others.
It’s the year 2020 and we still think inequality for women is acceptable in some forms and fashion. Let us not forget what Maya Angelou said about wanting to vote for a white woman over a black man. She said – women were the original oppressed group, thus we should work backward until all oppressed parties are equal. I agree with her.
We still think hate crimes against Jews and telling Jews that Israel should not be their country is somehow acceptable, despite those Jews having descended from that country. Would we say the same to Black People about Africa. Of course not! So why do we say it to Israel? Because of the Palestine Question which Europe in particular has decided to side with, uncaring of the history of persecution toward Jews and their right to have some land of their own. Of course we shouldn’t persecute Palestinians either and of course, Israel has made mistakes but it’s now about what optics politicians choose and what side of the story is half-revealed via inaccurate news reporting. It’s essentially about which side looks right to support? Because Trump supports Israel, most left-wing supporters are against it. Yet it is not that simple and never should be. Lest we forget our history.
We still think homosexuality is unnatural and abhorant and that being queer isn’t natural. We don’t say it out loud because it’s not popular to say it, but we think it and we act it and gays know. They know.
We talk about slavery and how horrific it was, but half the time we just pay lip service to the deeper issues, because we don’t know our history so we don’t mention Native Americans and how they were exterminated en mass and continue to be disenfranchised. We’re so proud of ourselves for changing the Red Skins but we think that’s enough. Or how slavery has never really gone away, it’s just changed hands and outfits, but it’s still well and thriving in many forms.
So it’s never enough. Until everyone is equal and inequality and racism are a thing of the past. But will they ever be? With people who seem to thrive on discrimination and putting themselves ahead of others and putting others down? If people think wearing a mask is too much, is it any wonder they really don’t give a shit if you are sick or you are vulnerable? Don’t they just want you to die and bugger off?
Likewise with illness, with chronically sick people, it’s never enough to just have laws that allow them to not be discriminated against because discrimination comes in a myriad of differing forms. Subtle. Unreachable. Devastating. People of color have to put up with this EVERY SINGLE DAY as do women, as do gays, as do sick people. Just one roll of the eye says everything. Says; ‘we think you are pathetic‘ invalidates an entire moment.
Chronic illness is a little like amputation. Obviously anyone who has suffered an amputation will refute this and rightly so. But metaphorically it remains akin to the loss of a limb. You are left flailing, unsure of how to right yourself, and continue as once you were. A part of you is lost.
They talk of periods of adjustment. The stages of grieving: Anger for what you have lost. Shame imposed by a society who now judges you weak. Acceptance of a ‘new normal’ that includes intolerable things such as chronic pain etc. For many, those stages of grieving never really end, they cycle and you go through different dilutions depending upon how you progress.
But progress is perhaps not the right word. In our linear society where so much is expected. For someone to drop off and no longer thrive, in nature they would be left behind to perish. In our society they are carried along but reminded frequently, of their burden, of their ineptitude.
For many who suffer mental illness, physical illness, both, there is a lot of shame attached to their existing after this fact. Even as people do not come out and say it directly (and believe me, many do!) there is a thin veil that is easily penetrable. People know when they are treated differently, seen differently, worse, judged without jury.
Being ‘sick’ in any manifestation is seen as a ‘weakness’ by our society. This invariably goes back to the ‘dog-eat-dog’ notion of surviving. The weakest link perishes or is a burden to the whole. But these days, with our so-called faith and mercy in place, one might imagine a little more compassion? And if you did, you would be sorely disappointed.
Since getting sick in 2017 I have felt intermittently well enough to continue working and ‘accomplishing’. But as with any pendulum, when it swings deeply toward illness, I am right back at the horror point of when it all began, down on my knees, imploring the universe for healing. And for the most part I have done this alone, because as all those who have been sick for a time will attest, most people do not stay by your side. Even those you expect to.
You can’t plan any longer. A trip is a fear because what if you get sick? Then someone suggests; maybe it’s in your head, maybe you are making yourself sick? And no matter how many times you prove otherwise, they think maybe it’s a choice, just like being gay is a choice, right?
Wrong. You can’t rely upon yourself like you used to because you never know how it’s going to be, how you are going to be. And usually you could be relied upon 100 percent and now that’s gone and somehow you still have to plan a future, but how do you plan a future if you can’t rely upon yourself?
I try to take something from every experience I have, including negative ones. Without learning we don’t grow we just regurgitate and I would rather grow even if I’m throwing up and in pain as I do it. I have taken from this experience what is obvious, but I have also tried to take from others experiences, and have noticed disturbing patterns among those I know who have also been sick for a while or a very long while.
People leave.
People don’t care.
Poverty goes hand in hand with illness.
Anxiety and fear are natural outcomes for a plethora of reasons.
Loneliness can kill.
What I have come to see is this. Sick people are TRUE WARRIORS.
They fight the unimaginable that most of us never have to endure. They have to get pacemakers in their 40s, they have to struggle through taking 2 hours to get dressed and STILL MANAGE TO SHOW UP and this strength – this strength is what I have learned the most from my experiences and listening to others. Strength comes in many forms. We dismiss most of those forms but they are real.
I watch people who have seizures and brain tumors, fight and fight and fight and I realize, we’ve got it backwards. We should be applauding these people not marginalizing them. But we do everything backwards, because as a whole we are poisoned by false ideas of what is valuable and what is not. We toss aside those we deem un-valuable when they are perhaps some of the most valuable people in the world.
So if you are disabled in any way, be it in your head, or your body, remember that. You are some of the most valuable people in the world. Let nobody ever let you forget that. You are some of the most valuable people in the world.
This is written for my sister Angie. You inspire me every single day. You are that light in the dark that refuses to give up and because of you, I refuse to give up too.
Quarantined kids escape briefly, screeching loud into empty streets
their thin bodies desperate for release and water sprayed
high into quiet air
I grew my nails because I am not touched, I do not arouse desire
there is no purpose in their being short or useful
for love I had once, in the magnolia dimness of loveliness.
Racketed sound is a mockery, a reminder of how things used to be
when you believed in love and it slipped through your hands
like porcupine quills that have no sharp
distracting yourself with empty boxes and things unpacked
for you belong not here nor there, nor any place
always the need to pack up and relocate, find what
has never sought finding in great wild.
You may judge if you wish
I did a good thing, though you will say it was wrong
I saw nature today at its most timorous and yet bold
I let it go, I let it go.
Many months I planned the capture of her off spring
as she ate from my plates, watching side-ways with distrusting gaze
I am after all, someone prone to superstition and wonder
she arrived a month after the death of my cat
it seemed in her resemblance, it was his return
then she is pregnant and I believe I can have
a house full of life again.
But this heart cannot take one more attempt at loving
this body though young, remembers the torment of losing
those mercies in the night and belief things last eternal
when nothing but the certainty of natures hammer sounds
and nature is not a kindly thing
though perhaps in her supposed cruelty, she is pure
whilst we save cats and neuter so that they may
grow fat and listless without purpose, swatting flies for entertainment
our city nearly drained of ferals and life, and hope, it occurred to me
I didn’t want her caught and diminished by
our belief we know what is right for
creatures of the wild.
I would say, especially as a virus seeks to diminish our population
a mass of humanity grown out of control
this is natures doing, this is the deliberate
consequence of our unprecedented surge to exist
maybe she will forgive
if she does not, is that even wrong?
We place our beliefs as if they are more
than tin soldiers and waxen effigies
as proofs of some superior knowledge
all against the tilled marrow of this earth
long outlasting us, fecund dirt and soil
from which life springs eternal and unfettered
laughing at our arrogance with our
purple capes of chastity and piety
golden crosses forged from raped stone
rules to contradict and suppress the powerless.
She was caught in this cold cage and I saw
her yellow eyes find mine
they say if you stare too long into the eyes of
a wild creature they will perceive a threat
better to bow your head in prayer and submit
they say too much that is tired and old
she looked at me and with the beseechmentof her kind and mine
she asked to be wild
not neutered for ‘her own good’
because she will develop cancer and her kittens
will die time and again to the coral snake and all
other natural things.
She wanted her chance at freedom
she would take them away now, her kittens whom I watched from
my isolation and my hurt, brightening my day
a salve of selfish joy, what is it that saves
the sanctity of the unsaved?
Her shoulders were down, almost crushed, I knew
to release was the greater good
as the wild rose is always more beautiful
on the wild rose tree and not in a vase
in a sterile room to bloom and wilt and lose
richer, than the bland salt-less life I lead
tame without children, without those who
call me when they promise to love and obey.
Our human folly I saw as glaringly
as those kittens in a line, following their mother
through high grass away
my heart stung, same as when my own cat
breathed his last and we said it was a mercy
to euthanize him in his pain
but what of his freedom?
Did he go from that place of needles and
kitty grooming and dental hygiene for pets
to something as noble as her green field?
I saw roses die when I was very young
even as I dried them and tried to keep their wholeness
they crumbled because life is bidden by our false extension
but the visceral and the sad and the sorrowful and the tragic
and quite often
something more achingly beautiful than we
with all our art and books and music
could ever be.
I didn’t want to let her go, I wanted to control
insert myself into the story
trap her kittens to tame them
save them from a less noble fate
and yet who am I?
Am I a worthy example?
with my loss of love, my lack of family?
who was I to prescribe my way? To these
who had every right to live their way?
You see, I have long known I am not
their superior, they are not inferior to me
I am neither their master nor willing to decide
their fate when they have a greater sense of life
real life, than I, in my artifice, ever will
I do not eat flesh for this reason, it is to me
a cannibalism in the way we farm and produce
milk and animal products neatly spit out
without thought to their suffering, or the
terrible way they know what will happen.
We are unnatural in our artificial world
we are too aware of things, our intelligence
can be as much a curse.
Many days I wake and have such a pain inside
me, I know only comes from the unbearable
awareness and I wish I were as simple and as
loving as those felines in my garden or that
I had not listened to sensibility as a young girl
and like this cat, who so resembles mine, who is dead
believed like the earth, after rain, we should
grow wild and free
unbidden.
Yet we have in a way, and with our vast numbers
disease and famine, virus and pest try to
even the score
it is as natural as it comes to get a virus and die
but we are not able to accept that, we believe we
should conquer this God given earth, spreading ourselves out
until we are no different to bacteria or roaches.
I pity us, I pity what we know and do not know
in some ways we are the same as this mother
trying to save her kittens because of an impulse
in her case the purity of instinct
in ours we have choices and often they lead to greed
and an insatiable desire for more.
I choose
seeing her resigned, defeated self
I release the cage, it springs back, she rushes out
it feels so right to see her dart across the field, unencumbered
I know she will take them far away now
I know I will lose them
I also know I never possessed them
and that it is right this way
for pets are not ours to ‘own’ or be master of, they are the chained
learned mules and horses who have been broken
maybe they do not know it and are happy
but what of those who are still wild?
Who am I to take, to decide? To think I know best?
I have read all the books about feral cat population
show cruel it is for nature to flourish unchecked
how disease runs rampant and sickness abounds
and I think of us and our wish to have choices
even as the same thing happens and we perish
to the hands of disease and the will of something more powerful
than our tinker toys and our belief we know all.
As much as she punishes me for my error
walking away, leaving nothing but footprints
in dry sand on my emptied deck
I feel I have listened to
something deeper than talk radio or
my biology books, I have instead
heard the call of the wild and it told me
do not always think you can disturb
this felted land with your superior knowledge
you should only know, you do not know
much.
How am I an example with my perpetuate grief
my unfulfillment, unhappy childhood, empty rooms.
All the awareness we have can be a curse
better to be wild, not to expect love or loyalty
those are human constraints, doomed often to failure
better to be without rule, not to live for glory or purpose beyond
the simplicity of instinctmy instinct told me to open the cage
it has always sought to protect rather than capture
even if she dies out there, she dies intact
not a creature molded by us, into something hybrid and wrong.
I have nothing in my arms now, as I had
nothing in my arms then
and I don’t cut my nails because there is no-one to love
or hold me when I need to be held
because humans promise and break those promises like
egg shells cast on skillets
because you told me you loved me always and
soon you couldn’t even lift a finger or try
to write a line in love, for your bitterness soured your
entire soul and I had a heart filled
but with no way to empty it.
I no longer want to be let down and told
I don’t write because there’s nothing to say
and I don’t want a relationship based on writing
because all those who were separated in the past
wrote letters to each other many, many times
no matter their distance.
It is rather, our modern impatience that says
I want it all now, I want it all or none
then you shall have none, as I shall have none
and all those wasted years were a grave mistake
just as many things I have done are.
I am not making another mistake
I will not keep her behind bars
where I have been waiting for you to do right by me
where I have been expecting to be treated right
when most people are anything but … merciful
it is our human world and I wish I were
instead that mother or a deer unbound
it is sad that we die of the virus
it is more sad, that we live as we do
things happen as lessons to teach us
will we listen? Or will we repeat
and repeat and repeat?
I release her back
into the mercy of the wild
where she looks once
over her shoulder and then
quick as lightning
she is gone.
Written in memory of the cat who loved me loyally more than any person ever has and whom I loved very much and brought with me to this country so long ago.
Never been good at receiving, prefer to give, in all things …
I gave you everything I had left, it wasn’t much, a persistent hole, had formed long ago and I was seeping out.
I look whole, but that’s just mythology. I may outwardly appear, to stand upright, but in truth I sag, even in wind.
If I had more I would have given it. You believed I did, as many before you did. I call that the capture of delusion, you see in me, what you want to see, not who is actually standing there.
And if I were a pirate, I’d have a wooden leg and a parrot. If I were a dragon, well hell, I’d be a dragon (and yes, I really want to be a dragon).
The doctor said I had a flabby heart, and still you believe me an angel. But angels play the lyre with taut string, not my kind of slack gut.
It didn’t really surprise me, at ten years, on the gym mats I recall my calves like moon cows, soft and milky, against tight sun-honed legs of my friends.
I remember when he took my blouse off and exclaimed; have you had children? A euphemism for losing the fight with gravity (even then, so long ago). Or standing on a chair, in the student dorm, to see orange peel running its fingers down my legs.
You never knew these things, you built an image of me from Ralph Lauren advertisements and The Blue Lagoon. You added my French ancestry and your own penchant for leather, making me an exotic bird I never was. Though if I had feathers, they would be tropical-coral.
It was addictive, to be seen through your lens, though I knew it faulty. Whom among us, does not want to be special and rarefied, if just once? And like an addict, I couldn’t wean myself far, from your camera, I didn’t want to go back to being, the flabby-hearted, plain- faced fish in the sea.
Try as I might, reality never lives up to the dream, or possession of desire. These are self-fed lures and we, the hungry carp, falling for our own tricks, being pulled from our refuge of water, lain out, gasping on shore.
As we lose the ability to breathe, in this strange land, oh how we rue our former vanities, and wish for simple love., laced, hand over hand, without deception.
The trickery we employ, to appear just fleetingly different, running from our truth. as the stowaway is always found in the storm, hiding behind bottles of rum, drunk on themselves.
I confess, I’ve never known how to be loved for this husk, the multitude of ordinariness. True then, it is hard to be loved if we loathe ourselves, we who are giving, sometimes do so, because we are trying to give ourselves away. Scrub the history of us, remake the self, becoming for a day, the fantasy held, by someone else.
Sometimes there is an unbuckling of
There is a thin slice of glass in my foot
It’s not all about me.
Never been good at receiving, prefer to give, in all things …
Woman
TheFeatheredSleep 