Uproot Me

I want to be uprooted.

Let the storms rip me from my tethers

and carry me away.

True,

it might feel like chaos.

But it might also

feel like flying.

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Wake Up Call

For this week’s post, here is prose-poem I guest-wrote for Ruby Browne’s blog, about the subconscious ways our emotions find their way out. While you’re there, I highly recommend reading some of Ruby’s writings about mental health. She’s amazing.

Ruby Pipes

“DSC_0087” © Harvy, 2012. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

You heard it before you knew what was happening, before you were even fully conscious, opening your eyes to the dark and to the sound. A ghostly sob behind hypnopompic curtains, fuzzing into your dream like an alarm clock. And maybe it was an alarm, in a way. Not the ring-ring-ring kind, but an alarm of another variety. An alert, a Mayday signal from your subconscious, saying wake up and feel this.

You woke after the crying had already started, the pillow wet beneath your cheek. You tried to keep the noise down, so as not to wake him. Because you wanted to be polite in your grief, because you didn’t want him to ask. Because you didn’t know the answer.

But you also needed to get it out. Out of your body as if it were something…

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Rain

.

Rain taps the roof like fingers tapping a shoulder.

.

Hey, the rain says.

I’ve got something to tell you.

.

Go ahead, rain.

.

I’m listening.

.

Alone

You are alone today.

And what an aloneness it is.

There is space when you are alone. Such roominess is uncommon for you. You feel compelled to test it, to savor it, so you stretch your arms out wide and wave them in propeller circles like that exercise in middle school gym class. All space. Space in your apartment, space in your head. You wave all the arms of your thoughts, hear the airy swish as they feel out their boundary-less quarters.

You can do things alone that you wouldn’t dare in front of others. Secret thrills.

Her Hungry Heart

Her heart was always hungry.

Its ribs showed all the time.

She tried and tried but it never felt full.

Sunlight on her wrist

Sun came in through the blinds as she laid in bed, casting a band of light directly down the center of her wrist. As if she had sliced herself and found golden light underneath. She laid there, that dreamy morning, and imagined that we are all full of light. Not blood, not tissue, not bone, but rays of sun. Maybe that’s what people are looking for, when they hurt themselves. Maybe they want to see that there is still a glow, just a small one, still there, hiding beneath the surface.