These Days I Don't Write Poems Anymore

By. Kelsay Myers

*please note this content may triggering to those who have experienced sexual violence and mental health struggles

“When you’re young. . .you move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. . .Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you’ve been.” — Margaret Atwood

These days I don’t write poems anymore, and I feel a part of me is too comfortable hiding, too comfortable with the idea of getting lost in the shadows of a self who never was or never was entirely whole. A part of me yearns for the girl I was because she was bold, or at least, bold enough. Bold enough to not care about others’ opinions and start rumors about herself being a witch; mischievous enough to dance ballet to Eve 6’s “Inside Out”; wild enough to run to the top of the Sleeping Bear sand dunes just to leave everyone else in the dust, literally; outrageous enough to write confessional essays and call them poetry; and so self-consciously meta even the confessional writers and postmodernists would be abashed. I know better than to get lost in the past, know that memorializing these parts of “me” is an illusion because they are still there somewhere deep, buried in a boulder I have built to block my way forward, so I can stay comforted and hidden there in the stories remaining a child, remaining a girl always.

But, I am a woman. I have a woman’s body and a woman’s temperance. Most importantly, I have a woman’s heart. I’ve seen hatred, looked straight into its eyes, and what I saw looking back was another lost person, and in the moments when her fists clenched so tightly by her sides it took all of her strength not to hit me, I felt only love. I’ve seen love in the eyes of the woman who molested me as we lay in bed in the early morning hours after a night of talking, then shouting by the firelight, and as I looked into her eyes while her hand touched my breasts and moved down inside my underwear, I saw that she was present within herself, so I disappeared from myself. I’ve done lines of cocaine at nine in the morning, then driven an hour to get to therapy where I felt so connected to everything in the fi eld that my right hand began to disappear, and only my therapist’s voice saying, “that feels really cool,” brought me back. A few months later, I told my therapist I had just met a woman who kind of looked like Bette Midler, and her favorite thing to do was make her body parts disappear, and she said, “You do that!” But I confess, I have only done it that one time with her and the drugs, so it doesn’t feel real to me. But I own these experiences, know how to integrate them, and how to separate them from my egoic self, so they don’t control me, and I don’t come across as a victim. But I am still bold enough to say “but” and to call attention to the fact that a part of me wishes I didn’t know the language to disperse my feelings and experiences as only parts of myself rather than all of me. The girl in me wants certainty and totality. I guess that is still comforting.

These days there is so much in the world: #MeToo stories, walls built on the blood, prayers, and exploitation of families, the erosion of our ecosystem, the endangerment of bees, Notre Dame burning, sex cults and sexual trafficking involving celebrities, college scandals involving celebrities, and bridges falling. I find it exhausting just taking a shower, watching Grey’s Anatomy, or writing an email, so I get all of my news secondhand. I watch life go by outside the window while I write at the dining room table because I have a need to be in medias res even when I’m home alone, and the only sounds are the neighbors’ locking car doors or the birds squawking as I sit typing and sipping yesterday afternoon’s coffee. At one time I was fresh, brewed by my hands exactly the way I wanted, but now I, too, have grown a bit stale. How does a person become happy again, even ambitious again? More specifically, how does a woman come back to herself after being sexually assaulted? I wonder this for myself more than for other women because I feel in all of the worldliness in the world, my own world has become incredibly small.

Much that is beautiful must be discarded

So that we may resemble a taller

Impression of ourselves

I read these lines by John Ashbery and wonder if we shed our lives like objects, what is left? I fear I have lost the ability to give of myself. I don’t write poems these days for a reason. These days I don’t write poems, I dance them and dance them with three thousand lives worth of yearning to be free. I dance in the desert with my shadow for two days and a night—a slow, primordial dance with darkness itself in which we are entangled, rolling in the warm, dry sand which rises to meet us: holding, witnessing, enveloping me and the darkness before daylight comes once again, and still I am dancing. Dancing alone, dancing with my therapist and teacher in the desert, but we’ve already danced this medicine before—the dance of healing hands, wings, feet, belly, three ancient Asian lineages, moving in and out of time and memory and boundaries. I fear I may be chasing sound healing journeys in the way I used to chase my own lightness. So many lessons have been forgotten in this moment. If I die tomorrow, will I have even lived? Maybe the world is a miracle that does not belong to us, as ashes do not belong to the Fall because it is just beginning.

A transformational writer and artist who stands for self-expression in all of its forms, Kelsay explores the dialogical self, found objects as metaphors and embodiments of the soul, and trauma healing. Other work has appeared in White Stag, Waxwing, New Delta Review and Portland Review among others. www.kelsayelizabethmyers.com