Dreams, Come and Gone

"Someone may have stolen your dream when it was young and fresh and you were innocent. Anger is natural. Grief is appropriate. Healing is mandatory. Restoration is possible." ~ Jane Rubietta

I stole away my own dreams with the mistakes that I made, but I am not uncommon in that respect.

The majority of the women in my circle of friends are single moms, like myself, and I'm sure the world over knows the trials and tribulations of women as us very well.

Forgive my anger, but what right does that then give a stranger to disparage me? I've done the best that I could with the resources available to me, longing for more, but never asking for it. Poverty is not an easy thing to overcome, though, and I tire of the struggle of redefining my station.

I wish I could turn away from the world at times, bury myself in the hot sand and bask in that ceaseless warmth, but I can't. Who would take care of my children if I did? What a saving grace they are, little human forms wrapped in justification and renewal. But they can only heal a portion of my fractured spirit. The rest... Only Providence can say.

Image: Michael Lukas Leopold Willman, Landscape with the Dream of Jacob, 1691

A Little Exorcise

My stomach starts to coil in knots whenever I think of betraying the story of my life and placing it upon a public medium or forum where all those who care to read it may read it.

I find poetry safer, much less stark than prose. Metaphor allows for obscurity, veiled and hinted meanings that are open to speculation and conclusion but remain unconfirmed.

I begin to wonder, though, if I've lost something in my strides toward more complex verse. Do grief and misery become things lessened by lack of proper exposition? I hope not, for the exorcism of words is without use then, and I've failed to find relief in the telling.

Echo Faintly

"I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all." ~ Richard Wright, American Hunger, 1977

Sidetracked

I've been away,
a journey through thoughts and feelings,
and if by chance I stumbled over doubts
from years departed,
mistakes made in imitation of perfect calculation,
frames of mind I assumed vanished,
then that is my affliction.
no, they are ever prevalent
for the city's bend has brought me full circle,
to the realization that
I haven't gone anywhere.