Declaration of Me

I'm in a dangerous mood today. Since I don't have anyplace suitable (i.e., private enough) for dancing like a lunatic and screaming at the top of my lungs...

I’m alone here
in this room
with the music
in my head
and my feet
move silent
to the beat
of the drum
that I hear
in my head
in my room
while I’m alone.

I've always been alone. I remember in seventh grade, my English teacher gave me a compliment--or at least, I interpreted it as a complement at the time. I wrote a half page story and she said it contained a novel's worth of buried fury. So I decided then that I was going to be a writer. Thirty years later I find myself with an obsession that has me by the throat and won't let go.

It echoes in the lonely silences
an endless twisting rhyme that rules my world.
Not only sound, but color, rhythm, light,
it dances through my day and dreams my night.

I wake and free the rhythm and the rhyme
to twist the dance into a human form.
The story shapes itself--I have no part--
and dreams escape the boundaries of time.

I sleep and shape the color and the light,
then form a dream into reality.
The painting moves my hand--it is not planned--
a lonely dance of medium and life.

The art creates itself with paint or ink,
with quiet promises it leads me on.
The end of life, the last of this creation
shall be my final epitaph in stone.

The obsession has never moderated, nor do I want it to. I've always been a writer. But sometimes there's an edge, a hint of something else beyond "just" a writer. Possibility. And I have to dance, or sing, or just sit and fidget because the joy of being fills me to overflowing and I just...can't...

Living consists of
a constant awareness
of the simple things--
breath, sunlight, wind, blood

But then there are the quiet moments, when I sit and listen. I was taught (not told, taught) to be inconspicuous, not to put myself forward or speak my thoughts. And so we have at the last a declaration of me. Take it as you will, because once these things are out of my mind they're out of my hands as well.

Duck and hide,
Don't draw attention
To the beauty you
See inside yourself.

That's boasting.

Duck and cringe,
Waiting to be attacked
For daring to change
The unchangeable.

That's rebellion.

Stand and wait,
Because boasting
Is the beginning
Of rebellion, and
Rebellion has
its own ends.

That's a given.