Its not clear (photo by John Scully)
My early journals were promises
Swaggering through life
paying no attention to onlookers
Diving into every first time
to the amazement of admirers
The heap of letters is now compost
Festering and full of disease
Sour memories of confusion
Flaring and smoking for nothing
They confirmed and affirmed
Travelled everywhere with me
I touched base as with a friend
Reviewed the past like a teacher
A therapist untangling my life
Displaying everything like the insane
It only existed if it was in my journal
23 years, a boyfriend,
scenic and threatening Windriver mountains
and a 60 pound backpack scramble,
crowd and settle in
filling my life
The man is the atmosphere
The ‘Winds’, lovers that thoroughly beat me up
And the backpack volunteers to help them
Bruised, scratched and swollen
I keep winning
The snow dares me, marking steep slippery boundaries
pushing me out of the mountains
I write that I have turned into a fountain of tears
We are my dad’s daughters
Only university degrees will make us his children
Good colleges and employers
agree that I have a good brain
I hold my BA “happy with life”
The MSc is picked up like a receipt from an office
I win jobs as I read the adverts
Dad smiles wryly
He and I would have been laughing
if schools taught faith
A restless spirit plagues me
My family loves me in spite of its foolishness
Friends unveil its deprivation
Men gut it out and parade it in the streets
By mid 1998 the scene gets so ugly
I can’t bear to look
Pages are torn off the journal
Incorrigible repetitive lines succumb to a fire
I stagger under the scorching heat
Employers run around me exhausted and confused
I turn 37 flying business class to London
Feeling “old, tired and ill”
asking God to “speak to my spirit”
A haphazard reference, a dated map,
a dirty mirror, a dustbin
A journal is a mad person’s chronicle
I turn 38 knowing if “I can be still”
things will be alright
“feelings are just feelings…and not the truth”
“people are innocent or afraid”
“I must stop fighting and leave others to flare”
Pages later, I turn 39
Am still stressed
I start a separation from the diary
A tome with no purpose
A friend writes on hers obsessively into the night
And then makes a fire of it
On vacation she talks to a new journal
more than she talks to me
A man’s lousy poem
is inscribed on my heart and my pages
“short hair, bright eyes, warm look
sharp tongue, wide smile, proud lips
…Until next time”
This writing is now terminal
I have no record of turning 41
Dad dies, quaking the earth
Its no use scribbling as
doors to my life shut and trains leave its station
I have nothing to say
Nothing I know can help me
I give in
and eat my mum’s lunch
My spirit becomes still
And I write a good poem
by
BT
