deeper breathing - Reminscem #2
My next Reminiscem (my old poetry with my ‘modern’ commentary on it) for your reading enjoyment.
deeper breathing
Shimmering, Running, Shining black
Rising, Gurgling, Hungry red
It's Steaming, Teaming, Simmering
leaving but trapped,
It's multicolored legos building Fort Uncontrollable.
We’re supposed to be different
but lately we have blended in to one molten lava mess
spouting from a child’s science project.
Under high pressure situations, we may explode
into shrieking, consuming bile.
A will-to-suffer blob reaching maximum velocity
heading straight in the direction of the nearest source of pride.
And we never retreat
no we keep pushing and forming and changing
others. Though we have no desire to
They take our shape and we lose ours.
Just the first of the many faces we have given
away again and again.
They’re all inside my head and the responsibility
to keep them, to love them, and for them to worship me...
I may implode with this weight unless I release.
Unless I give it to you.
See you are the only one I can bless with this
share the wealth card. You can bear the seesawing
emotions, random complaints, and constant demands,
but you don’t know how receiving you can be.
Your heartline is strong.
I want to become hospital colors. Softening blue,
comforting green, lazy pink. Moldy colors indicating
life handed over to someone else.
I’ll become the pastel after dinner mint
to freshen your breath after you’ve devoured each organ.
My lungs will add to your screams, my heart to your beat,
and we will digest our victims together.
If you cure me, I’ll cure you.
Commentary: I wrote this one in high school, and I remember trying to describe the feeling of high school and its culture. Whatever that culture was, and I would not have used the word culture back then, that this thing was out of control and devouring its people turning us into something we weren’t.
And I was clearly angry about being transformed. Were we smart girls? Well-behaved ones? Bad girls? Sluts? Was he a bad boy? A good boy? The kind you date? The kind you run from? The overwhelming constant classification and judgment.
I also felt this sense of expectation. That other people decided who you were, and then you had to play the part. If they thought you were good, you had to be the good girl or you got penalized. Don’t step out of line. But you were also boring and uninteresting if you were good.
Even now, I can feel the stress of the game. I still have nightmares of being back in high school. I’m often roaming the hallways or a party trying to find someone, connect with someone, but I’m alone.
Towards the end of the poem, I clearly was looking for a partner. Who could I give this responsibility to? Who could I share this burden with? Or maybe let them fight the battles, and I would fade away into nothingness.
This is a poem I never want to edit because even though it’s not perfectly written; it perfectly captures that raw time when I was fighting to know and be who I was. And it feels to me like the conflicts we now see playing out in modern high school stories (e.g. Euphoria which is WAY OVER THE TOP compared to what I experienced) versus what I watched in my youth.
