I Feel

I feel strong.
I feel weak
I feel torn asunder,
a massive puzzle with an ever-changing image,
with pieces missing
and the clock ticking.

I feel dark. Empty. Vague.
Chronically unsure
of most things,
clinging to a God who has never abandoned me,
but has led me to the cliff so often
that all vertigo is gone.

I feel something beyond gratitude for my wounds
and scars and the battles won and lost.
I feel like dancing.
I feel like fleeing.

I feel power that is not mine
for I am spent far too often.
I feel love I do not deserve.
I feel hatred I do not deserve.
I feel wonder that I still stand,
joy in my children,
hunger for solitude,
hunger for peace, for feeling settled
in a twisted ever changing house of mirrors world .

I feel hope when there is no reason for it.
an irrationality that has plagued me most of my fragile life.
and mostly,
has served me well
except f course, when it has betrayed me utterly.

I feel exhausted, the battle of depression
now a decade old, never won, never lost,
never ending.

I feel elation.
A God who loves me, despite myself,
A woman who loves me.
Children who love me.

I feel the peace of now.
Bills paid another month.
A place to sleep, A stack of books.
Beauty surrounds me.

I feel fear, an awareness
how quickly worlds fall apart,

I feel dry as the corpse of wildflowers,
my color gone, my dead stalks waving in the wind,
until the next season of warmth,

I feel blind, with a story of blindness to tell,
unsure, always unsure,
if the tale matters
to anyone but me.

About this poem.

When I began therapy years and years ago, one of the things I began to work on from the very start was reaccessing my feelings. I was never great at it, though I recognized early on in life that I was largely driven by them. That trouble of identifying exactly what I was feeling got harder as life grew more complex and I become so enmeshed in doing, in trying to hold things together, that there was no place (I foolishly thought) for my feelings.

So my counselor put me on a regimen. Each day I was to stop at some point in the day and write down what I was feeling, and why. It was hard for me for a time. Hard to put clear words to the emotions. But as time went on, and I kept at it, day after day in my journal, I got better at it. And that has helped me, as a person, and as a poet.

I still do it. Each day (or almost each day.) writing what I have been feeling the last 24 hours, and why. Generally it is just a laundry list, a reflection. It makes me think and at times I will, after writing my list, write in more detail about one of more things on the list that need to be worked out in my head.

Today, however, it came out as a poem. Dang muse. You just never know when she’ll show up.

Tom