Wednesday, May 29, 2013

"Much will be said, but little will be done"

1400 posts.
That's how many posts I have written since September of 2006.. This will count as 1401. But 142 of those are in draft, and on review I don't see that any of them can be salvaged, but there you go.
Its been a strange time here at Bulletholes lately.
Many things unsettling. Many things unsettled. Many things that will just have to wait.

I think back over the last year, and it seemed like a lot of nothing.
I think back over the last year, and there were a lot of things I didn't think I'd ever feel again.
There were a lot of days I felt huge. And a lot of other days I felt so small.
There were days I felt huge and small and huge again, all inside the space of a few moments.
Those are hard days, and they leave you feeling oddly out of place..

I can look back, and I see that I moved from my apartment, and I got separated from my Home group at NA, and I started going to fewer meetings.
I have been going back to more meetings lately, about one a day for two months now, and its got me through a tough time. I've even been going to a treatment center the last month, and sharing my story with addicts that are trying to get a day clean by being in a 28 day rehab. That is very rewarding to do, we keep what we have only by giving it away,and its my ministry I suppose, if you want to put it that way.

I also separated myself from something I loved, and that was hard too, and unsettling.
The ways of love are hard, and sloppy and all over the place it seems, worsened by the fact I'm not really free to talk about it, which in fact I'm finding is a blessing too, not being able to talk about it.
Talking doesn't really seem to help.  I find myself relieved many days by what I haven't said even more that by what I have said.
A guy at the group said something a few weeks ago:
"Much will be said, but little will be done."

Part of what that means is something I've learned the last few years. The circumstances of our lives may  change very slowly, but the way we view the world can change right now.

I've been playing the role of the roommate for a year and a half, and its not a role that suits me.
After abandoning the search for a house to buy a year ago, I overstayed where I'm at and find myself just about miserable there.
But I'm moving in two weeks to an apartment close to my group, where I can relax again, and cook naked in the kitchen if I like, or watch TV in my shorts on the couch,  just like the good old days.
Home hasn't seemed like home to me for many years, but maybe after this latest sojourn, I will find my place.

Oh, while we are at it, lets link to one of my favorite buddies UF Mike, and a story he wrote a while back that I think is sheer recovery beauty.
Its called "Alcohol"

Thursday, May 16, 2013

APRIL SHOWERS

She and I played in the rain
We would walk to the top of the hill
And break a small piece of twig
To float in the gutter
Back down the hill we would follow our twig-boats
Wait patiently for them to free themselves from eddies
Watch delighted as they bounded over and around
Small rocks,
Clumps of leaves
Cracks in the pavement
Then skipping through the rapids
We landed at the bottom of the hill
Drenched and happy
Running back to the top
To do it all over again.


bulletholes 5/2013


Friday, May 10, 2013

ALTO TEXAS



I haven’t seen mom in 26 years. I haven’t been to her grave, where she sleeps next to dad, in more than 20 years.
But I’m going tomorrow, and take a rose, and place it there for her.

I’ll walk the dusty red road by her mothers place, look to see if the frame of the root cellar might still be there in the bank of the hill. When we were kids, into it we would peer, and shudder at the thought of what may be inside the cool dark earth.

Down the drive I’ll stroll past the big planter next to the black walnut tree; the well has been gone for some time, but likely there will be a trace, and I will remember trying to find my mother on the big porch.
I had lost her apron among all the other aprons, and I went to Uncle Jack, who told me she had fallen into the well.
“How do I get her back?” I asked in tears.
“Go turn the faucet in the kitchen on” he had told me.
To the sink where I went and cried a river waiting for mom to emerge genie-like out of the faucet.
What a bastard, that Uncle Jack.

I’ll look to see if my cousins homemade horse pen is still there, rustic and made from several hundred saplings, held into an almost perfect circle by baling wire and whatever, and by the sheer strength of Kevin's cowboy will.

Next door to my mothers mothers place is my mothers mothers sisters place, from a time when family and community were indistinguishable, a time when towns were just big families, and you only needed a few families and a couple of loners to make a town. A time before the family’s had all scattered. Both house’s both looked the same, with the well, and the wrap around porch, the fig trees and plum trees from which jelly's and preserve were made. Under pecan trees in the back yard there would be a stove, used for canning during the summer, sitting there bare like the trees in the winter, under the glare of the Vapor light.
I'll look to see if the big iron cauldron is still there, right in the middle of the yard, used for boiling cane and sorghum to make the syrup and molasses Uncle Jack liked on his biscuits in the morning.

I’ll walk back out to the road, along the stretch I remember from when I was a very little boy and my cousin Patricia had taken me by the hand and we picked flowers from the roadside to make a bouquet. Blues and reds and little pinks, I thought she was beautiful, this young girl Pat who would become Miss Little Rock a few years later, and maybe tomorrow there will be flowers for me to pick, and to place there for Pat's mother, my mothers sister. Maybe there will be enough blooms for all four sisters; raised in Alto Texas, they are together in Alto Texas, still.

Maybe there will be flowers enough for all the great aunts, and all the grandfathers and grandmothers, all the cousins and second cousins, and half brothers.
Maybe there will even be one tiny one for Uncle Jack, the good man with the barbed wire wit and big heart.
It seems certain parts of the family haven’t scattered after all.


Friday, May 03, 2013

LIGHT BLUE

I was going to buy you some perfume.
The kind you wear, the kind you bought me.
But I decided I was trying too hard,
Holding on too tight
So I wrote these lines instead.

I can remember the smell of you
And your perfume
The way it would linger for days
Until I could see you again
I’d pass you in the hall
And at the bottom of the stairs
And it was like you were still there
A spirit lover.
I’d smell you as I brushed my teeth ,
and put on my shirt…

I loved you so much then and I still do.
I never stopped.

Now I put on my shirt and find my shoes
And I just feel so homeless and lost
You've been gone for months
Still its been your lovely scent 
Your impression left in space
Where you have passed  

(the French call it sillage)
Guiding me out the door each day.

I believe the whole world becomes a marvelous place
A marvelous place for everyone in it
When you are with me.
I step outside, you fill my empty world as
The clear pink morning turns light blue  and full of love.

bulletholes 4/2013

I thought I'd given up writing pain poems a long time ago.
I'm hoping it doesn't shine through too sharply on this. The world really doesnt need another "her smell" poem, but there you go.
I had posted it a few days ago, but took it down. i wanted it just to be for me and her for a while.