do it like a dance
“You can do it like it’s a great weight on you, or you can do it like it’s part of the dance.” Ram Dass
Today, a poem. Apparently (according to my therapist and my friend, in that order), this week has been intense for many people. Goddess knows why. So today, a poem. Poems always make me feel like the intensity of being alive is somehow worth it — if it can make you feel something, it’s worth it.
I carry it like it’s a weight on me
A three hundred tonne boulder on top of a 5 foot 6 frame
It holds me down
It takes me under
I’m in the crush of it, and I can’t breathe
I’m plunged into desperate pools of inspirational quotes and
empty affirmations
Salty water fills my mouth and my lungs
My ears ring
Is that a saxophone playing the blues in the distance or —
Did I imagine it?
It carries me through the hours of my day
like a vice around my middle.
I wake up and pray for nightfall
Night falls and I pray for the day to arrive
Tears spring forth from the depths of my guts, and I —
Hide
I can’t move, it’s too much, it takes me out
It holds me down
And then, relief
I’m breathing again, and again the cracks of light shoot through the broken frame I dropped that year
That year filled with so much silence
My beloved sits inside it, smiling
Laughing at me
Don’t take it all so seriously
He doesn’t carry it like a weight
He does it like it’s part of the dance
I keep the broken frame because it reminds me
That the cracks in my skin
They’re where the light gets in
The cracks in my psyche, the parts of me that might be marked as
Hysterical female, age 36
They’re where the light gets in, too
Even when the weight drags me down
The tide swallows me like I’m some sort of —
Hopeless hapless woe-be-tide
Last week he told me that I didn’t have to prove anything
I didn’t have to do anything more than be alive
But then, — why does it feel so hard all the time?
Well, baby
you’re not dancing
With love,
Nora x
Excellent poem