Waiting to Feel

Something happens in the night.
It is as if my demons of the night
are not violent but bloodsuckers,
leaving me pale and without emotion
early in the day.

It takes time. A bit of discipline.
and often an image to get my emotions
to show themselves.
This morning, it was a window.
Not the one sitting above this poem,
but one in a diner where I sip coffee,
knotty pine on the wall, a view to the street.
I can see a sign for the local gas station.
There is a reflection in it, a blue blinking light
from the policeman behind me,
watching the road and the kids crossing streets.

Until I sat down, I was something of a zombie.
I am most morning, able to go through the motions
without emotion. Waiting for my heart to kick in.

So, back to the window. I looked at it.
The knotty pine reminded me of my grandfather,
my least favorite grandfather,
and the one room in their house, otherwise so formal,
that was added on, sometime in the fifties
when knotty pine was all the rage.
There were lots of windows and a recliner
where he often slept while golf droned
on the televisions.
There were books and trophies along one wall,
and behind them, the real books,
pulp mysteries with lurid covers
and dark stories full of badly written emotions.

But still, those old books shaped my life,
added to the Puritan stiff upper lip life
I was taught by my parents example,
they showed me a different way to live,
full of heart and often messy. I fell in love
with lurid and noir
and so it was that knotty pine brings
all that discovery back, It is a good feeling
in what otherwise was a dimly lit life.

You can never underestimate what a taste
of passion can do to change your life.

I used to look at windows differently.
At times they were prisons, a place to see
what the world had that I did not. At times
they were beacons of light
in my all too dark world.
Now I see them differently,
as holes in the wall I surround myself with,
a place I can climb in and out of,
not unlike what I did as a child,
when I need to escape
from either world, traveling always,
always towards the heart.

About this poem.

It does take me a while in the mornings to know how I feel. It is often an image, either in life or from my collection of photographs that wake me up enough to know. And I used to climb in an out of my window with regularity as a young person. Even though I was on the second floor.

Tom