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Tag Archives: pain

Backspace Delete

22 Thursday Nov 2018

Posted by Kristine in Uncategorized

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amwriting, backspace, boring, delete, family, grateful, keep going, pablum, pain, PC, politically correct, rage, Thanksgiving, writing

After much thought and personal debate because it’s been a long year of night I have decided to give thanks.  Everyone is giving thanks for something right around this day, right up until they pass the gravy. How could I resist thought, debate, and gravy? 

The “winner” of my thanks is three-fold:  The backspace bar, ctrl+backspace bar, and the delete button.  (Note the Oxford comma there?) 

This year (and I am not kidding) I am grateful for the ability to backspace or delete.  I would rather remain on a blank page with a blinking cursor tempting me to “go on… go on… you know you want to say it!” than saying it, the satanic cursor that wants me to puke out every last thing I think or feel and make it public with the push of a button! “Go on… do it… it’ll feel so good, it’ll be okay….”  So I took up the keyboard and wrote terrible things, damning things on long pages of Word documents or little tweets or other social media platforms that zoom past where we are always in danger of being pushed off into an oncoming train. I wrote missives and critiques and opinions no one asked for while dabbing lukewarm coffee I spilled on the tablecloth or sucking Chinese food sauce from my fingers and (allegedly) from the keyboard from which I write this thing, the letters “j” and “g” are sticking…. 

I am grateful to be able to scream to the holy high heavens that everything sucks and I hate everything, that I am a miserable piece of shit and nothing matters, but the backspace button gives me space to take it all back before you see it. It allows me to wail and whine and cuss and be so damnably politically incorrect. I get to be petulant, pedantic, sexist, racist, ageist, uniformed, uneducated, illiterate and worse–boring! 

You don’t get to see that I still hit the @ key when I meant !  and that’s because the blessed backspace button exists. You don’t get to see my exposed private parts that disclose rage and horror in favor of vanilla and pablum.  (Somebody who reads this might know where that came from.)  

So, thank you, backspace and delete for allowing me to tailor my thoughts and words to be delicate, kind, favorable always.  I guess it’s what I believe everyone needs.  Thank you for giving me space to scream and throw things and give you a piece of my mind and then deleting it all because the world doesn’t need another angry woman. How could that be helpful in any way? Thank you for helping me sort out tornado thoughts from surgical words and maybe that’s not the right thing after all, but today is a day for grateful, for sharing, for embracing those we love who we haven’t seen in a long time where we keep our real words in purses on the floor in the bedroom and we don’t open them until we get home and we weep.  

Thank you, backspace delete for helping me figure out why.  

Thoughts of Laquan

06 Saturday Oct 2018

Posted by Kristine in Uncategorized

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16, bullet, change, child, holes, justice, Laquan McDonald, love, mother, murder, pain, sixteen

One

  Two

Three

Four   Five  Six

                      Seven

Eight

Nine
Ten.    Ten.   Ten.

   Eleven

                      Twelve

             Thirteen 

                Fourteen                                         Fifteen 

Sixteen. 

 

I’ll bet you’ve had sixteen kisses planted on your face when you were in the middle of something by a little kid who loves you, rapid pace, out of the blue, the moment when your child’s cup overflows and they must kiss and love the joy is so much and you might have been annoyed for breaking into your busyness, but sixteen pecks on your face. Pixels cannot hold that moment but a heart can.

The number means something different to me today. It means less because I am not his mother, I am not from his community. I don’t know what she knows. But still, I think about him today, and yesterday.

I don’t know what 16 bullet holes looks like in my son’s flesh, or even my own.  I could draw little dots on my body to see how it looks but that’s dots and this is flesh that will write junk today and junk tomorrow. I just need someone to know that I won’t forget. That her son matters. Justice matters. And I don’t want to play this numbers game anymore.

(Turn, Turn, Turn)

29 Wednesday Aug 2018

Posted by Kristine in Uncategorized

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birds, cicada, family, glass already broken, loss, mistakes, moon, pain, philosophy, season, Serenity prayer, the Byrds, Wheel, writing

I begin this morning that could feel like I’m sifting through a house fire, blackened, burned, sopping wet, heartbroken, but I am determined to hold my head up and say this is a new day, one I begin with raw skin and foal’s legs, and I will make something good of it.

I begin this morning clinging to a philosophy, one that says my favorite glass that sits on the shelf is already broken.

I begin this morning clinging to the serenity prayer that tells me to accept the things I cannot change.

I begin this morning better than I left yesterday. I was overwhelmed. I tore my house apart looking for something I’d lost. I cried. I still cry.  I slept, unable to face the everything that came down on me because it’s clearly gone.  One small loss drew in a lifetime of loss, like some magnet that attracts black matter, black star, black planet, a life implodes, and yet I still get to choose how to face this minute, and the next and the next.  I saw all your faces, I relived all your hearts and every mistake I ever made that hurt you and hurt me. I slept and I survived.

Things happen all around me and I didn’t always notice.  I’ve been trying to get better at observing and writing to understand.  When I was a kid we would visit our grandparents in the Garden State of New Jersey, land of the farms and high tension lines.  I used to collect cicada shells in those late summer days, carefully plucking their delicate bodies clamped to a tree and putting their husks in a coffee can. Quite a pile. They had a unique smell almost akin to ancient books in a back room library but with a whiff of life that is begone. Until recently, cicada always meant “summer sound, dormant, collect husks for fun.”  Once we brought a cicada home, kept it in an aquarium and watched as it broke through its old body and became wetly new, expanding, growing, alive, astonishing colors!   We put it on a pine outside when we knew it was time.  It never made a sound, and I never saw it fly away, yet what a gift we received that day.  Here, there are cicada who made their home in the pine tree across from my door.  They react to birds invading their branches, the cicada fly away (actually flying! away!) and come back when the bird is gone. The needles even shake when their heavy, black bodies depart!  And when they are comfortable, they sound like my dad’s radial arm saw, calling calling calling all summer day until dark.

I never knew cicada could be so proactive. Their large, black bodies are busy in ways I never saw before.  Meanwhile, I have to decide what is more important this morning: Life ever changing, words and images I lost yet I have the time and the place and the ability to write about everything, with everything I’ve got right now.  Cicada know it’s all on the table and it’s now or never. They give it their all.  And I don’t want to be a dried husk stuck to a pine tree with no story to tell.

Do cicada grieve? Do slow-motion butterflies who pass by the pines care?  I don’t know. All I know is that the finches will be back next year to make several noisy baby broods, gulls will patrol the shore for unfortunate fry, and the moon will be bright in my winter window.

Upon Finding The Dragon’s Egg

24 Thursday May 2018

Posted by Kristine in Uncategorized

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amwriting, beach, dragon, egg, fear, Jim Morrison, ocean, pain, poetry, prompt, the Doors, weather

I awoke abruptly, squintingly, because the sun peered in my bedroom window, an alarm my body cannot refuse. Strange sun, Jim Morrison said in his notebook poem, and I opened my door after I put clothes on (but not shoes because no one needs shoes to walk from the balcony to the cool beach sand that was not far away.)  Strange sun well-riz on my right also known as East, the train of cool blue dawn retreated into the distance, laughing gulls squeaked overhead and moved on instead of making their usual mocking laughter from the breakwater that sounds like children a mile away calling out for help because they are drowning.

I walk barefoot on a beach where I found seashells in all stages of their lives tossed on the shingle by an uncaring sea, but all those shells and emerald mermaid’s hair wafting in the tidal pools are gone.  The Army Corps of Engineers came and did one heck of a job building up this little spit of land that had been slowly reclaimed by the ocean one winter storm, one summer hurricane at a time and now my feet trod sand the size of peppercorns instead of soft, creamy quartsy silt I fell in love with, all those tidal pools gone.  I am grateful yet disoriented. Strange.

So this morning I woke and walked and found the dragon’s egg. Should come as no surprise to anyone because the system that came from the west moved in and brought us a week of rain and a night of high wind, fearsome wind too early for hurricane but made us reach for our batteries and bottled water anyway.  I plucked the egg from the sand poor thing blown from her nest, abandoned, knowing that’s the worst thing I could possibly do but when did I ever abide by the rules, and I held it in my hand wondering what could I possibly do?  And then the shell broke, the creamy satin shell broke open and spilled out venom all over my hand and it hurt like the sting of a bee that begins slowly and takes over your interstitial fluids and spreads out and swells because it really, really, does not want you to be offending it yet you have by simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time and you are paying for your transgression. I held the dragon’s egg, seeping fluids hurting so much, but my pride kept me from screaming so I ran down and into the cold, cold water and submerged me and the egg hoping the pain would ebb.  The silken shell stuck to my hand. The venom came forth like a ginger lady’s tresses, Rapunzel-like, then dissipated in the brine. The shell dissolved and my pain dissolved too as I panted hopping foot to foot hoping not to step on a skate just going about his business.

All Your Birthday Are Belong To Us

11 Wednesday Apr 2018

Posted by Kristine in Uncategorized

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birth, life, memory, mother, pain, period, sister, tough shit too bad, woman

you would never believe how big you can be
until your bellybutton turns inside out.
you would never believe how much pain you can take
(your mission, should you decide to accept it)
until you accept it, knowing
the pain train was coming,
ready to deliver a full body-blow
that you’d forget it like nothing,
all that stretching and bursting a shadow
a breeze on a mountain you left below
like the chat you made with the guy who
tattooed “always” on your tender skin
or the reason you put it there.

you would never believe how much you can figure out
curled up on a towel in the dark,
a hard plastic piece in somebody’s endgame,
you become your own mother
when you figure out the gore will stop when it’s ready
and not a minute before
like it does sometimes
so sweat it out, sister,
allow yourself a whimper, walk the floor
you ain’t dying though it feels like you’re birthing the whole damned world
tonight.

you would never believe that the body can shut off the faucet
a freaking morning miracle that you can breathe pain-free now
the clot-o-rama paused
courtesy of healthy organs the doctor said he would never remove
because you are fifty and want a reprieve
but you get what you get and you don’t get upset because
there are one hundred more birthdays waiting to burst through
before this is done.

A Storm Day

12 Monday Feb 2018

Posted by Kristine in Uncategorized

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amwriting, birds, dark, life, pain, purple pen, Shogun, spring, storm, wind

The morning is so dark as I write, but I look forward to the promise of rain. I finished the last page of a journal, one that took too many years to write and the wind and rain have come. A battleship passes. Foghorns are lowing. The winds are gusting at 30 driving rain from the North, Northeast. It is a writing day, a living day.  In the early morning hours gray but still the finches (sparrows?) were active, flitting, calling in words I cannot mimic. They were rejoicing in the rain, here are the worms and the grubs and they can feel the spring coming, I haven’t heard their ruckus in so long, how I missed them, missed windows open, hearing wind in the pines.   And now they are silent in the darkness of 11:41AM, wind gusting, a candle burning for someone who doesn’t know her way in the dark yet.

Empty beach chairs sit on the balcony holding court
Arms touching discreetly
Waiting for rain.
*******

My Pilot pen, made in Japan (Samurai?)
A full container of ice cream placed carefully in the garbage
Because I couldn’t unstick the lid (all the tricks were tried)
And my old-lady hands and fingers hurt all night and day from the trial
Well, at least I can still hold the pen.

The light is brighter now, I feel I need to get moving. Henry’s birthday is tomorrow. Light is calling. I know the temperatures will fluctuate and I will still need piles of blankets and layers of clothes before my skin can be exposed, no matter how glorious the air from the south feels. My little toes know frostbite, and seagulls have an agenda.

Solstice at the Thirsty Camel

22 Friday Dec 2017

Posted by Kristine in Uncategorized

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darkness, fire, friends, hope, journal, light, music, pain, Solstice, Thirsty Camel

There is glitter on the table and salt in my book
gritty on my arm as I press down to write.
I sip and lick salt from my fingers.

No one sits in the center of the room
bodies huddle at the bar, hug the walls,
so I sit at the back where I can see you all
Ballcaps, hoodies, Santa hats, sweaters
Blondie in a ballgown texting who knows what.

I claimed a table for friends tonight,
brought a candle and journal to fill the time until their faces appear.
One by one they come and we make the ‘howdy stranger’ talk
over light beers, battered onions, and speakers playing a bit too loud.

She came in last, her withered body wrapped in sagging jeans
and a pretty white sweater made of cloud,
her face tells me her kitchen is on fire.
We danced around her fire all night trying to douse it with smiles
and talk of the sunlit moon, Saturn in transit, but
she wanted to sit in her kitchen fire.
We left her there watching as she poured old wine into older skins
wondering why everything in her world leaks
pushing hope away on the longest night of the year.

Lenny came on and gently, so very gently, plucked strings in the dark
to tell us about that famous blue raincoat, the one torn at the shoulder
and I knew we were meant to be here

and that we should always carry hope like a lighter in our pocket
for those nights we go astray.

March 8 dream

08 Wednesday Mar 2017

Posted by Kristine in Uncategorized

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child, dream, evolving, pain

The plot of the dream is very simple:  A toddler, after having a play date, does not want to go home and throws a fit.  But then a dream is never just that simple.

The child was a flaxen-haired boy with lots of curls and he was lying on his back, pressing his palms and calves into the low-carpeted floor, screaming.  Screaming. Screaming.  He sounded like the young man they scooped out of a crumpled car and loaded into a Medevac ‘copter that night before the morphine kicked in.  I wonder if, in my dreamstate, my cortisols or adrenaline kicked in?  So in the dream the child stopped screaming, stayed still lying on the floor.  I stood over him and said kindly, “I know how much this hurts. I know you are in so much pain. But tell me, does this make it better?”  The child said nothing.  I told him, “You are not welcome here again.”  I looked at his mother and she nodded her consent, she understood, and the dream was done.

Gifts From Pain

26 Saturday Nov 2016

Posted by Kristine in Uncategorized

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death, dog, pain, rain, sorting

Somewhere out there a red doberman’s bones rest in the deep woods. He lies beneath the mouldy-scented earth made from ancient maples, oaks, and silt from the overflowing creek.  His master put a bullet in his brain and buried him there. Last night I wondered if he leashed him to a tree to do the deed?  I wondered why he taught his dogs to taunt and terrify a caged raccoon, how could this sport be justified?  My father held me while I cried so hard. And then I wondered why he came to my father’s funeral when he assured us he would not because he does not attend those kinds of things. Yet in he walked with them, the aged Con-Ed gang, fugitives from a ghost gallery, clinging together, this group of men whose names I heard all my life. I wonder if he remembers his dog in the middle of the night.

The whales came early and the wind has returned. Ten knots and rising.  The rain is apparent on the roof. Sunrise two hours ahead.  I played with a black doberman and his buddy the red on the beach today, then I lay in bed for hours tonight curled in a ball waiting for the pain to stop, then suddenly asked myself what kind of dignified woman just lies there and takes it? How is lying there hoping the pain will stop anytime now wise or mature, like it’s my job and responsibility to suffer? Or all those nights I couldn’t breathe, stubborn in the belief that me and my clogged bronchi would fight through it without need of a chemical and everything would be just fine. I mean, oxygen isn’t that important for good sleep, am I right?  I have a right to breathe, and I have a right to sleep without pain. (Oh, and the list doesn’t end there.)  Tonight I couldn’t sleep thinking about dignity, the first time I heard that word and what it means to me now. It’s hard to sleep when the walls are breaking, when the past is shedding, flowing away into a cold, rainy, beautiful night, so I got up to write.

Somewhere out there a broken bone is mending, the body sleeps in a cozy and needed bed of opiate. I asked him to feed his mind/body/soul with all good things for healing. He hears me in a fuzzy kind of way, and I know the rest is up to him. I wonder when he will hear the word dignity and truly heed its meaning and make it his own.  It’s not a despairing kind of wonder, because I know it will fall on him the way things fall on me in the middle of the night. So. I will take two Tylenol, my own advice, then see what kind of day I will make for me. Damn that wind is high.

In Praise of Pain, Flying Things, and The Universe

28 Sunday Aug 2016

Posted by Kristine in Uncategorized

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evolving, fear, pain, spheksophobia, Universe

“You didn’t know that? You of all people?”

“No,” I said, tempering further reply.

“Yellow jackets, like many organisms, when you alarm or kill one, give off a pheromone that calls others for help.”

“Okay, good to know.”

“Really surprised you didn’t know that.”

“Yes, well, as long as I stay out of their way all is right with the world. I’ve developed some good tactics for doing that, actually.”

“Such as?”

“Oh, wearing perfume at night instead of during the day, avoiding wearing yellow. Not drinking from soda cans outside, only containers with closable lids. Staying away from abandoned cars where they might have made a nest. Keeping windows and door ledges clean. I also try to avoid eating mustard or ketchupy foods outside but that can’t always be helped. And never returning to Lake Compounce amusement park.”

“Oh, so basically never going outside, then. Nice life.” His tone brought it all back, but I knew there’s little point discussing the strides I’ve made managing a phobia with someone who doesn’t have one.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of dining by the Hudson River with friends, which is a really fancy way of saying we was chowing down on finger-licking barbecue food and beer at the Ribworks. All was well until a yellow jacket wafted down onto my glass. Guess he wanted a little sip of salty margarita.  I stayed in my seat and watched it for a few seconds, then calmly lifted myself from my seat, said excuse me, moved back a few feet, then waited for it to fly away, which it had no intention of doing, so my chivalric gentlemen waved it off my glass. G looked at me and said, “Really?”  I nodded and smiled, knowing that at least in this stage of my life I didn’t turn the table over and run out into traffic. (Had I been a Marine,  I would have given away our position and my comrades would have shot me on the spot.)  I said, “Horror movie bad guys wielding axes? Machetes? Fine. Bring.it.on. I gotta problem with yellowjacks, however.”  He wondered about that, so I explained it had to do with falling on one as a child, getting stung multiple times for the first time on the back of my tender little leg while mom was a block away, and the time my son was in his baby sling, I stepped on a ground nest and received multiple stings. We discussed the differences between honey bee and wasp for a little while, then went back to our drinks and talking baseball.

I’m trying to cultivate a harmonious existence with bees, but it’s not so easy for the little girl of me to do when a yellow jacket appears. Her mind overstates the memory of the pain, the most horrific pain she’d ever experienced, the memory of walking home alone, all that way without comfort, the humiliation of taking wounds when she was in the wrong, not the bug.

I wish we could all accept each other’s irrational fears, heck, irrational anythings for that matter, have patience with the other when the panic comes. It’s not for us to understand and certainly not to judge their fear or pain.  How lucky I am to be able to think kindly of laced wing moths in the corner of the old apartment; luna moth on the convenient store door in the rain; fragile, steadfast honey bees dressed in fuzzy amber; curious, quick carpenter bees; bumble bees whose flight defies physics; salamanders and newts who mind their own business between roots; roly poly moist toads standing guard on basement steps in the moonlight; copperhead baby wriggling on the factory floor, mouse running for its life amid screaming women on their office chairs.  Helping Yaro find a cup to catch the mouse, watching the guys capture the baby copperhead wearing welding gloves and tossing it out beyond the retaining pond instead of killing it.  When will I give this same patience, this same understanding to the yellow jacket? I do not know. The little girl of me once believed that having babies, bullet wounds, tattoos, and getting hit by a bus was preferable to the experience of a yellow jacket sting. I can marvel at my progress, but it still needs work. This emotional wound needs healing in order to make peace with the yellow and black.  I am grateful to the Universe who brought this to me.

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