Museum of physical pain or Gallery of an injured soul?

Might go to both!

So long since I have been here. It would be unfair to say that I have been meaning to come but it is not the same as coming. But now that I’ve come, I brought fruits and flowers on a warm Sunday afternoon.

I don’t know what to do with the marvelous gift that is life. Neither do I have the hands to unpack its beauty, nor the heart to love it like it is my own.

The past few months I have spent in my head; the nights on the edge of the bed. My body’s been the least pretty thing in the museum of physical pain. I developed fibromyalgia five years ago and the years have been a long, dark tunnel ever since with no open skies in sight. I cannot turn sides on the bed without whimpering. I cannot sneeze or laugh without my chest hurting. I cannot pick up something from the floor without going on my knees. Muscles feel tightly chained by barbed wires. My experience of life has completely changed and I wonder how much mental illnesses, and physical ailments induced by mental illnesses take away from a person.

I am looking for things that could ground me. People, places, prayers, anything. A month or so ago, I had a severe dissociation episode; until then I was convinced that in my story, anxiety would always be the worst thing to happen, but dissociation is scary. I constantly feel like I am walking in a dark jungle even though the world, animals, people, and buildings are all around me. Sometimes, on the road, I look at something and I feel like I will just continue walking towards it, completely forgetting that it is a road and a car could just crash me.

I am looking for hope. I know too many details about myself that aren’t lovely. I need more money desperately and a better job. I am tired of this city. I have nowhere else to go. What if I had a house of my own and my mother was still there? I would go back running and hold her and be held and forget that anything hurtful ever touched us.

People always say, “Why don’t you write more?”; but writing isn’t easy. Writing needs burned hands and a constant realization of fire. Writing needs messy rooms and unaesthetic hearts. Writing needs loneliness and unresolved conflicts and the skin of the cold floor rubbing against your skin. Writing needs you to unscrew your insides and see what birds are caged in your body.

Writing comes from the injury of the soul. It is best not to know the gravity of the injury for wounds can be misleading and healing often happens in its own timezone.

Please feel free to write to me and do not go by the sadness of my face or my newsletters, I am a super fun person and despite the pain in my chest, I laugh. Wishing you rest and relief.

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Some poems for you:

1. My Hole. My Whole. by SAM SAX

what to call you who i’ve slept beside through so many apocalypses

the kind that occur nightly in this late stage of the collapsing west

boyfriend was fine even though we are neither boys nor men but love 

how it makes us sudden infants in the eyes of any listener—how 

it brings us back to some childhood we never got to live. that was, 

at the time, unlivable. my sweetheart. my excised sheep’s-heart. 

my fled garden. my metal garter. after yet another man calls his wife 

his partner at the dog park it’s clearly time to find another name for you—

he says it’s my partner’s birthday we’re going to buca di beppo then key largo—

and wild how quick a name becomes yet another vehicle 

through which to reproduce violence. partner fit like a skin and then 

that skin tightened and tore off—you who are neither my chain 

italian restaurant nor my all-inclusive vacation spot. not my owner

or my only or my own. not my down payment or my dowery

of sheep and crop. not lost. not loss. apophasis is a way of naming 

what is by what is not—but what is? my boutonniere. my goofy queer. 

my salt. my silk. my silt. my slit. my top and my basement. my vanquished 

prostate. my battered apostate. my memory. my memory. my meteor. 

all these names for what exactly? to introduce what is to those 

who don’t know. this is my whole. this is my hole. take part of me.

2. There Is No Word by TONY HOAGLAND

There isn’t a word for walking out of the grocery store

with a gallon jug of milk in a plastic sack

that should have been bagged in double layers

—so that before you are even out the door

you feel the weight of the jug dragging

the bag down, stretching the thin

plastic handles longer and longer

and you know it’s only a matter of time until

bottom suddenly splits.

There is no single, unimpeachable word

for that vague sensation of something

moving away from you

as it exceeds its elastic capacity        

—which is too bad, because that is the word

I would like to use to describe standing on the street

chatting with an old friend

as the awareness grows in me that he is

no longer a friend, but only an acquaintance,

a person with whom I never made the effort—

until this moment, when as we say goodbye

I think we share a feeling of relief,  

a recognition that we have reached

the end of a pretense,   

though to tell the truth

what I already am thinking about

is my gratitude for language—

how it will stretch just so much and no farther;

how there are some holes it will not cover up;

how it will move, if not inside, then

around the circumference of almost anything—

how, over the years, it has given me

back all the hours and days, all the

plodding love and faith, all the

misunderstandings and secrets

I have willingly poured into it.

3. Now That I am In Madrid I Can Think by FRANK O’ HARA

I think of you
and the continents brilliant and arid
and the slender heart you are sharing my share of with the American air
as the lungs I have felt sonorously subside slowly greet each morning
and your brown lashes flutter revealing two perfect dawns colored by New York

see a vast bridge stretching to the humbled outskirts with only you
Standing on the edge of the purple like an only tree
and in Toledo the olive groves’ soft blue look at the hills with silver
like glasses like and old ladies hair
It’s well known that God and I don’t get along together
It’s just a view of the brass works for me, I don’t care about the Moors
seen through you the great works of death, you are greater

you are smiling, you are emptying the world so we can be alone.

4. Enough by SUZANNE BUFFAM

I am wearing dark glasses inside the house
To match my dark mood.

I have left all the sugar out of the pie.
My rage is a kind of domestic rage.

I learned it from my mother
Who learned it from her mother before her

And so on.
Surely the Greeks had a word for this.

Now surely the Germans do.
The more words a person knows

To describe her private sufferings
The more distantly she can perceive them.

I repeat the names of all the cities I’ve known
And watch an ant drag its crooked shadow home.

What does it mean to love the life we’ve been given?
To act well the part that’s been cast for us?

Wind. Light. Fire. Time.
A train whistles through the far hills.

One day I plan to be riding it.

5. The Patience of Ordinary Things by PAT SCHNEIDER

It is a kind of love, is it not?
How the cup holds the tea,
How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare,
How the floor receives the bottoms of shoes
Or toes. How soles of feet know
Where they’re supposed to be.
I’ve been thinking about the patience
Of ordinary things, how clothes
Wait respectfully in closets
And soap dries quietly in the dish,
And towels drink the wet
From the skin of the back.
And the lovely repetition of stairs.
And what is more generous than a window?

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Something to watch for you:

People don’t erase people. They remember them.

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Helping hands?

Even if you are not in the capacity to help financially, do share my newsletter with those who you think might fancy it. I am sending you love and gentle pats regardless.

I am still not comfortable with the thought of monetizing my writing. It almost puts me to shame. All I want and wish for is stable mental health and a stable financial life, even if only for a little while.

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Until next time, my lovelies!

With love,

Prashant.