proteanme

These days I find myself thinking kind of “chicken soup for the soul” thoughts. Like right now, I just thought there’s nothing a chocolate cookie can’t make better. I don’t really believe it, but I do understand that for me junk food and TV are part of my coping strategies. Not the best ones. Not the worst ones either.

But then I remembered the PBS show I saw last night and this woman, who survived the Holocaust, was talking about having to leave her cousin to die in the snow on the ground outside their barracks.

I tried to leave RU an uplifting message the other day. A message about how we will be fine. Our lives are changing and we are in transition and it’s really fucking hard, but no one’s trying to chop off our hands. So we will be fine. Luckily, RU is in a place where she heard that as heartening as opposed to darkening.

Dark people bring up dark kids. And broken people raise their young with scraps and bits, string and paste, whatever splintered off, whatever’s lying around.  Stop gap measures, quick fixes, slight of hand–techniques better suited to a house of cards.

That’s why poetry works. It gets at all those things in a way prose can’t, not without run on sentences and footnotes and extra chapters and the next thing you know you’ve got a five volume set of crap that even you can’t stand to read no matter how self involved you are.

You wouldn’t know it by anything I said here, but the sun is shining.