I FEEL SAD . . . that’s how I started
my Blue Tomato Journal this morning.
I drew what I felt like,
a sad wilting brown plant on a table
with rickety legs.
The cartoon me looks bewildered.
I’m not bewildered, I’m a sad BROWN kind of sad.
I couldn’t use any color in the drawing,
even though I’d gone outside
to try and change my sad feeling
and taken some beautiful photos
The red zinnia
the Heavenly blue morning glory
the lone fig high up in the tree
which I WON’T ever get to eat!
A blue jay will get there first.
The fragrant tea olive blossoms.
A beautiful obscure weed
The first Jean May camellia sasanqua
The last of the cherry tomatoes.
The gorgeous heirloom tomatoes
I bought to eat & keep the seeds.
It didn’t help my feeling sad.
I feel like everything I’ve been
accomplishing or building toward
is slipping away,
no forward energy,
no ray of hope,
no excitement about anything.
Nothing’s working out like I thought.
That’s the problem with having expectations.
I shouldn’t feel sad, I think to myself,
but maybe it’s an accumulation
of little disappointments,
like my evening class,
and that I’m going to have to
quit the clarinet, it hurts my arm too much,
or frustrations, like self-publishing my poems,
and anyone ever hearing my music,
or ever getting a scale model set built
of my sketch for the musical.
Maybe that’s inevitable when
you have so many bright ideas
that come out like magic,
like the soap bubbles I love,
and then POOF they're gone.
And, I’m so tired of having
to make so many decisions
all by myself,
What to get fixed?
What to do myself?
What to leave undone?
I had a dream last night in which
I was left out of a familiar group.
That’s how I woke up feeling this morning--
feeling like I don’t belong,
“No one to hear my song”
as the lyrics go in my musical.
That dream is about not having
a group I belong to, that I fit into.
The sadness is about an accumulation of stuff,
like the dust I wrote about yesterday.
And then I thought,
I can post the poem
I created yesterday for our Friday Writing.
We have no expectations when we do our writing,
just let flow whatever wants to come out.
The writing exercise was from the book,
Old Friend From Far Away:
The Practice of Writing Memoir
by Natalie Goldberg
“Find something ordinary
and write about it.”
She wrote:
It is the only blue glass vase
on the wrought iron shelf,
sitting at the end of the row.
It’s bright color mocks the other clear bottles.
The sunlight streaming through
the window stops in the cobalt,
held like light in a church window.
A single mum tops it, like a mop of hair.
Any moment it will dance away from the others,
like a scene from
Fantasia.
----
Mine was:
I’ll tell you about something
as ordinary as dust,
piling up on molding
or floating in a sunbeam
streaming through beveled glass
on a Saturday morning.
Ordinary red-dirt-dusty-car dust,
until someone with a swipe of
their finger, writes WASH ME!
I’ll tell you about something
as ordinary as dust
gathering on piano keys
with the lid left open to capture
the instant pleasure of playing
a familiar tune.
Dust reminds me of an unseen world
that quietly builds and grows,
like anger or resentment
until some nagging finger
of conscience or consciousness
says WASH ME!
~~
This blog is a life-saver!
It’s instant gratification for creative effort.
Even though only a handful of people read it,
somehow it gives me hope,
just to know
I’ve put something of me out there,
somewhere in cyber-space,
and I’m not so alone.
~ ~ ~
No comments:
Post a Comment