The united states of abandonment and jellyfishing
Hello friends. I learned this week that I need to offer a transition explanation for those of you who first met me as an herbalist some time across the past 7 years and who know me primarily as an herbalist and listener with/to land and forests and plants. A few words of explanation for people reading my poetry for the first time this year and either worrying about me as an individual or worrying about sensitive and soft people surviving the human world in general this year. So, this is a two-parter: first, an essay of transition called Poetry is water and highly sensitive folks are jellyfish, which isn't just about poets it's about humanity, followed by a poem called The United States of Abandonment and Jellyfishing. Read one or both. Like us, they belong together and go much deeper together than alone.
Poetry is water and highly sensitive folks are jellyfish
I've been a poet since the 3rd grade, although I've taken large chunks of time away from poetry when the human world convinced me that we need to abandon our true selves for more important pursuits. What a crock. As if there could be more important pursuits than figuring out how we can uniquely help serve the world we all love, as individuals and collectives. Wonder and grief always bring me back to me though, back to us, back to poetry. What have you been since the 3rd grade that the world told you it was unwise or unprofitable or unsafe or just plain weird to be? Silly, silly human world. May we all know better soon.
As it turns out, my poetry has alarmed a few folks this year. People worried on my behalf– worried about the pain of holding such big and intense emotions. How sweet is that? Friends, you don't have to worry about me when I'm writing and sharing poetry. That's just me being me. If you must worry, then worry about me when I'm not writing poetry. That's when I get into trouble and tend to need far more help.
I didn't think to explain that my movement away from full-time herbalism and back into writing, and especially poetry, would mean seeing a lot more of me and my insides. A Me that's always been here: every single day that you've known me. It also often surprises me that others have the time or patience for reading my poetry. My poetry is often a wandering and airy impromptu essay spoken by a slightly tipsy friend while you're both happily lost in a wide and embracing woods and picking words and apples from old trees on abandoned land that neither of you owns. Not at all like most of The Great Old White Dude Poets. I'm not for everyone. In writing I take my time and I make no apologies for it (ok, that part of me is like an old white dude– I liked it, so I borrowed it) because slowing down together is part of the reason I'm here. I also deeply appreciate your attention and concern, friends and readers. To the point that the following transition essay showed up ahead of and attached to the poem I was writing this week. So here we are together, on a fool's errand: a moment of me using an essay to explain the unexplainable. That is, what it feels like to live in the human world as a highly sensitive being....
Welcome to jellyfish world
Well first, you need to know that we don't live in the same world. Not exactly. Have you ever been snorkeling, scuba diving, or to an aquarium that had a massive tank that made you feel like you were watching a completely different kingdom than the one you live in? That everything was obviously not for someone like you? That's what it feels like to be a highly sensitive being among humans in public. All the time. At least here in the U.S.
The visual I always think of for being a poet, and an extremely sensitive being or empath or creator, is a jellyfish. Humans have complex digestive systems. Jellyfish have simpler digestive systems: and you can see right through them/us. As deeply sensitive beings, or empaths, or poets, or creators and makers and artists and parents and caregivers and herbalists and other deep sensitivity-centered paths, we're jellyfish. In hard human cultures (not all are but mine is), we jellyfish seem strange to others, and we can move in strange ways.
We can feel and hold the joy and pain and suffering of the whole community– the whole planet, actually– but we can’t let the whole community or world's pain and suffering stay within us for too long. For example, I have to let the world's pain and suffering and wonder and mystery float into me on the water and flow through me. Writing helps me digest them, examine them, embrace them, transform them if needed, convert some of them into energy and action, turn and return some of them within beauty, and let much of the pain and suffering dwindle within, and then go. Creation here in jellyfish world is that. Creation is joining that rhythm: an ocean-tides rhythm where you're not in charge of anything beyond moving as you naturally move, glowing with curiosity and wonder, and transforming pain into beauty and connection and loss into understanding who and what it takes to let go forever or to let go for now so that returning and starting again later is possible.
Writing essays and connecting to the green world to make plant medicine work well for me for long chunks to time. Until they don't. Some things are so horrible, or so full of wonder and mystery, or incomprehensible, or they feel so fundamental and important to our relationships and evolution and revolution, that they're flat-out impossible for me to process as an essayist or an herbalist. Why do I keep trying to process a world of logic-defying wonder and pain and suffering alone? Who does that serve? – I ask myself, now, almost weekly, especially when our friends Numbness, Distraction, Blame, Rage, Feeling Isolated and Hopeless and Alone, Depression, Anxiety, or Addiction knock on the door. I ask Who does that serve? to remind myself that I'm a poet. Of the jellyfish clan. Of the niche: transparent. A poet is so porous that she's never alone: like a jellyfish, the vast world she lives in is always pouring through her, inside of her, and in her wake as she moves on.
About jellyfish people
Some of us have emotional skin so thin that you can see all the way through us. Don't make the common mistake of thinking that means we're fragile. In a human culture constantly demanding that things are either good or bad, black or white, 100% right or 100% wrong– and that we must choose a side and then stay there defending it forever to the point of cruelty and other absurdities– being fluid and moving and see-through and soft is brave. And can be dangerous. All sorts of different trans beings understand this immediately. Not just the emotionally transparent, like me.
Being open and visible and welcoming the world's pain to pour through us– being soft and fluid and connected– is not fragile. Fragility is brittleness. It's a quality not natural to shell-less earthlings that's born of being isolated, stretched too thin, for far too long, and becoming emotionally hard to the point you can barely breathe and far beyond what's healthy. Hard, fragile folks deflect emotions (you feel that way, I don't) or bury and ignore emotions (nobody here feels that way) and that leads to denying what is, hiding from what is, not seeing what's obvious, lying about what is, trying to kill off the parts of ourselves, and then others, that the world doesn't like or understand. Fragile folks are like a mirror– returning anger to the angry, cruelty to the cruel, and pain to those in pain, an eye for an eye– perpetuating anger and cruelty and abuse and neglect or abandonment across families and generations. Or worse, coming to the point where things like cruelty, abuse, neglect, and abandonment are preferred– because they're hard– and becoming an instrument of pain and suffering trying to remake the world in your own unhappy image.
Fragile folks shatter, or fear they will, and so they do everything imaginable to avoid shattering. Jellyfish people don't have to do that. Poetry doesn't do that. Music doesn't do that. Dance doesn't do that. Empaths actually can't do that: emotional harm to anyone at all hurts us exactly the same, whether we like or approve of the person or being or group or not. But we don't shatter. Like water, we ripple, we infiltrate wherever we're most needed or accepted, and we move on.
One of the upsides to having the same emotional skin thickness that we had when we first showed up in the world is that almost all earthlings, including people, automatically trust those of us who are open books (dear Lord, now I'm mixing metaphors– Poet Me loves this, Essayist Me hates this. Wah! Please stick with Essayist Me three more minutes and just ignore Poet Me's shenanigans). Even in times as confusing and terrifying and horrifying as now, I am trusted by almost everyone I meet, including strangers, and remarkably, across language barriers, most backgrounds, and skin tones. Those of us who naturally and gladly (most days) feel what others are feeling as they approach and fluidly adjust accordingly, and who listen or weep or scream or laugh easily with strangers and friends alike, tend to be experienced as extremely trustworthy, because we don't stop what emotion is required of the moment. We don't stop what is. If weeping or screaming or banging pots and pans or overthrowing a corrupt government or even a global flotilla of people pressure is required to meet the moment, we don't stop it. We hold what is, all grief and all beauty, and we join in every moment that we feel the invitation, or call, to join. In times when brittle, angry, deluded, and ruthless rulers want everyone to feel isolated and alone, jellyfishing and joining others are among the most powerful ways of being, and actions, that exist.
Why people love poets and dogs prefer treats
For those of you worried about me personally or about poets and highly sensitive people in general right now... The pain you hear in a poem may be a poet's own pain, yes, and it's also the pain of a community or family or friendship circle or of a whole people or whole place or whole neighborhood or region or forest or river or ocean or even of a whole period of time or planet or universe: an enveloping, moving collective being that the poet never fully breaks connection with. We float within this vaster being. We are held as we move in the emotional water. Talking with others or singing or dancing or banging on drums and protesting with others are fantastic ways to hold the difficult and process extreme emotions, yes, and. Poetry is simply another way.
Poetry, like community and friendship and silence or movement or laughing or screaming together, envelops extreme emotions and holds them so gently. Allows them, allows us, to just breathe. Breathe without destination. Breathing deeply, we can transform into other things. Sometimes beauty. Sometimes calls to action and change. Sometimes simply asking for help. Sometimes an evolutionary leap forward. Sometimes an awareness that it's time to let someone or something go. Sometimes returning to something left unspoken that's ready to be spoken now. And sometimes sharing experiences and stories so horrible that they can't be shared in any other way until they emerge softly or screamingly as poetry, on the page or in the laptop or phone, first. There are many things in this world that must be whispered into visibility. Some things that must be screamed to be survived.
My own people were gentle, and so loving, thank the stars, or God if you prefer. And, they didn't have all the answers. It's taken me a long time, but I finally have more control over how much emotion I absorb than I did when I was younger. No, that's not exactly it. Here we've collectively figured out how to make the good that we are, and that we absorb, even more radiant and softening, and how to make the pain and suffering and loss that we absorb and experience more connecting and softening, and so a hairsbreadth less devastating, even when we're completely devastated. As hard beings, we can shatter. As soft and fluid beings, we can ripple. There's often the width of a hair between these states of being. Poetry keeps us soft even as we do and experience very hard things. Poetry buoys us and keeps us moving as ourselves, so we can then keep insisting on returning to and being our soft, and world-softening, selves. Keep sticking with all those just trying to do the same. We stand with– well, float with– all beings simply being themselves and those trying to get back to being themselves again.
It’s taken me five decades to figure out how to be super sensitive, see-through-walls-only me in the human world. Accepting help often helps. Dropping old roles and masks helps. Helping people in trouble helps. Surrounding yourself with non-speaking beings who just get it helps. Decentering myself helps sometimes– although as a cis straight woman trained to always decenter myself often the opposite is true for me too. Decentering human beings as a whole almost always helps. Regularly finding inspiration in or taking advice from trees, forests, fields, bodies of water, stars, dogs, cats, birds, and whole neighborhoods and regions is my only secret, and even that's not a secret. Reading and writing poetry helps when nobody and nothing else can. It's taken me decades to both see and accept my role in being a filter for tiny particles of pain and suffering and loss and wonder and joy in an ocean of human suffering and surprise and delight similar to the way jellyfish can help filter tiny microplastic particles from water. I let go. I float along. Pain finds me. Wonder finds me. Poetry finds me. Surprises me. Fills my emotional lungs and heart and skin and bones– all of which are far vaster than one small body.
Being a poet is creation and is also less about creation than it is about falling in love and making a bit of lovely sense or silly nonsense of every surprising experience and emotion showing up within us, and learning to hold hands with emotions, and then ourselves, and neighbors and strangers and readers and listeners, as we collectively break down old walls impeding connection while allowing walls that anyone present still needs to be there to remain standing and strong. Why do this? Because we can. It's who we are. And this time, we means earthlings. Especially in an abuse-and-abandonment centered empire and country determined to use their final dusty and official breaths to try to tell us that almost nobody has agency or power anymore and that we all have to accept abuse now– up to and including, genocide and ecocide and concentration camps– and that nothing can be done. Nonsense.
Be who you really are. That's it. Be who you really are more often. Be who you really are together, with others. Being who we really are makes truth tellers of us and liars of all remaining parts of us, and of empire, still lying to ourselves that we are powerless and that things are hopeless. We are powerful, vast beings full of wonder, possibility, humor, imagination, curiosity, ingenuity, and love. We can literally light up each other's eyes from the other side of the room or the other side of the world! We can make dogs, and even cats, smile! Stop buying and spreading the lie that we are helpless.
That was Essayist Me.
She likes to help. Bless her smarty pants and heart.
Poet Me just loves. Loves and loves and loves and loves.
Making sense of the senseless is not a poet's primary purpose: deepening the mystery and falling ever more deeply in love with the mystery of life and the living is.
I am here to fall in love repeatedly– and to help everyone I encounter fall in love– with whoever and whatever is present now. Love enough to change what isn't working for those present. I serve everyone struggling with loving what is. This is why people either love poets and poetry and keep us close, or they hate us and only turn toward us when they reach depths of grief and loss so far beyond comprehension that they can't fathom and handle and hold them alone anymore.
And, it's why dogs, when asked, tend to prefer treats to poets– very few dogs struggle with loving everyone and everything present. Plus, it's hard to compete with peanut butter. I wouldn't even try.
Jellyfishing
I always know Poet Me is fully present when new words show up.
Jellyfishing is state of being + knowing exactly what you at your best– that is, you just being you– feels like, both from within you and to those around you who love you so well that they can feel when you're off and not feeling like yourself. Jellyfishing can happen at any visible level: personal, interpersonal, family, community, region, state, nation, continent, planet, etc. Likely happens at smaller, invisible-to-the-human-eye levels too. You'll need to talk to a different kind of doctor or researcher or poet than me to learn about that.
It's taken a long time, but I know what me at my best– me just being me– feels like now, and I know this for those I'm close with as well. This makes it really hard to be with me if you're not being honest with yourself– and you don't want to be honest with yourself yet because you're afraid of the fallout or change– and vice versa.
I, for example, when just being me am free floating, moving here and there often, both clear and mysterious, full of radiating wonder and a love of being new places, meeting new people, reading new books, and trying new things. I am always gathering wonder, fallen plant petals and leaves and buds and branches, stories of mystery and wonder, and tiny bits of universal grief and pain. And I have the power to connect with anyone and with everything. That's me being me.
Simply accepting, or choosing, who and what finds you– choosing all life that this one small body or group and enormous universe-holding heart and spirit encounters– feels like a game changer. This is jellyfishing too: you, accepting what comes, even when you must transform yourself, or let people go, and/or transform the experience, to hold it.
Yesterday I heard the late, great poet, Andrea Gibson– who only spent 50 years in their beloved body and then left it so they could be everywhere– say that the moment they started praying for what they already had was the moment that all their prayers were answered. That's what I'd been writing about yesterday! That. When I say to choose everyone and everything you encounter, even beings and things you have to leave in your wake, I mean that. Thank you, poet. Thank you, sibling. Thank you, exquisite teacher of jellyfishing. I'm so glad that you get to be you and everywhere all the time now. We need you.
Wrap it up, Lori
Well, that got away from me. Poet Me likes to get up in Essayist Me's business some days. I say this all so that you know that you don't have to worry about me. I'm not having a nervous breakdown. I'm not holding pain and loss and worry and rage and other strong emotions that I cannot possibly hold. I'm just a poet. An empath. A jellyfish.
For others pondering their jellyfish nature right now, know that I’m pretty good at being me now, and there's nobody else on earth who I'd rather be than me. My super sensitivity still means I’m often happiest alone, with fields and trees and plants, with a handful of loving friends and family, with jellyfish on other continents, and one-on-one with others or with small groups of sensitive people and creators, musicians, and people held by and spreading the humor of their people. Across the past two decades I've learned that I'm also completely at ease within large groups of caregivers, and large groups of people with dementia and brain injuries, and absolutely massive groups of protestors and with people screaming and fighting for justice– getting those emotions up and out so they don't fester and stagnate within, eventually interfering with connection and reconnection– and in communities full of people all focused on the most vulnerable among us and how much we all care about our neighbors. Which is more and more places, even in the U.S. Hard to believe, maybe. But that's jellyfish world.
Whatever happens, whatever keeps you up at night, remember that water is life, and that we're mostly water (roughly 60-70% water overall with both our hearts and our brains roughly 80% water), so really all of us hold a bit of metaphorical jellyfish within us, even when we don't identify as jellyfish. Jellyfishing, whenever possible, is strongly encouraged and encouraging. There is no inappropriate time for jellyfishing. The grownups are wrong on that score.
And now, a poem.
The United States of Abandonment and Jellyfishing
1.
Have you ever had a loved one who just replaced you?
Just decided you weren’t enough
decided to get a different version of you
maybe a smarter model
or a younger model, maybe
someone easier to control than you
or someone more silent and adoring or maybe who
agreed with them more? Had more in common?
Wasn't so uppity?
Someone– not you– who gets all the words right or
someone whose presence alone won't make them face
or speak
emotions they're just not yet ready to face and speak?
Have you ever had a friend decide
that all the things you used to do together
just aren’t fun anymore
just don’t matter
that getting together
just isn’t important anymore
and, maybe, that you’re not worth it?
Stop inviting you places. Or stop visiting.
Potlucks to loaves to mere breadcrumbs until you're down
to less than one text or one visit a year?
And then nothing?
And not even tell you?
Just ghost you emotionally
then physically?
Have you ever had a family member
prioritize strangers over you? Or
not even notice
that you’re struggling?
Not care that you’re hurting?
Just absolutely not give a fuck
about you
at all?
Have you ever come to the realization
that someone you dearly love
wouldn’t notice or care
if you just disappeared?
Believed that only your funeral
would bring them to your doorstep?
Or to tears?
And maybe not even then?
Wow does abandonment suck.
Wow.
I had no idea.
2.
Online we hear a lot
about people abandoning their bullies now, left and right:
their MAGA parents
their racist uncle
their Covid-denier aunt (the one who managed to survive Covid)
their groping, creepy neighbors or cousins or brothers.
And more and more, in the case of cis straight women
giving up on dating or marrying cis straight men
at all
preferring the company of friends, family, pets, coworkers
other more loving and accepting and interesting and expansive communities and
forests and rivers and mountains with
wide-open skies.
People giving up on friends unwilling
to say the words genocide or concentration camp or white supremacy
or sex trafficking or pedophilia
out loud
let alone stare into the eyes of the people our governments and weapons
wound, terrorize, imprison, and kill. And far worse than simple killing,
starving some families and children to death–
with their sunken stomachs, bloated chests, sharp joints,
and tiny curving spines and cries–
while the rest of the world's children watch.
Some abandoned people
abandon their own humanity.
When I was younger (up until yesterday)
I did the same—abandoning others—
at 18 I fled from my bullying home state—
though my own family was gentle and lovely
bullies for sensitive spirits were everywhere else I moved there.
Sensitive Me had too many battle scars from simply being myself.
Too many random young and old men– and the dead-eyed women
who served and became them–
pouring their bias, prejudice, bigotry, violence,
controlling nonsense, and rage into me. Or trying to.
Spreading pain around, intentionally, as if that could get rid of their own.
Well-loved by my people, I was not raised to take abuse.
Being wanted and loved so much
raised me– even without talking about it much– to walk away
from intentional abuse,
and to run
when you have to.
Survive.
Find new people to help you start again
come alive. Thrive.
Together. Always together.
So, I did.
And.
These days, I’m feeling things
from another side.
Not as a runner away
not as an abandoner leaving
for greener pastures now
but as just me.
Abandonee.
The one left behind.
And it really sucks.
Being abandoned by someone you love
really fucking sucks.
3.
It sucks to not be good enough anymore
and to not fully understand why.
It sucks to be abandoned
by people you love. Who don't want to spend
time with you anymore. That don't seem to
love you anymore. Did they ever?
And that you’re not quite sure
if you should, still, love
anymore or not.
Should you tolerate
neglect? How many years?
Just move on?
This is not to say
that we should never leave
abusive and neglectful people, organizations, governments.
I still think we should when can't create
or speak our words out loud or
if our community can't help us figure out
what's happening and we are drowning
and nobody notices and if nobody is truly helping or
they themselves won’t get help or accept help
to shift so we can all be ourselves more freely. And
when they’re a danger to us.
And of course,
if you can. Not everyone is lucky enough
to have the choice to leave.
And yet.
And yet here
I have to say.
Being abandoned by people you love
sucks.
It just sucks.
No matter who you are.
Abusers may deserve to be abandoned
yep, and
no child– at any age– deserves to be abandoned.
Abandonment fosters abuse
almost as well
as abuse itself does.
I don't know how both of these things can be true
at the same time.
But they are.
4.
I’m so tired of living in a society
run by the abandoned.
Run by the always-angry
always-blaming
run by cheating, thieving
billionaire men
who thrive despite all their blatant cruelty and abuse and illegal behavior–
equally as tired of poor men dreaming of, sigh, getting to be them one day–
men so twisted around within
that they'd prefer us to be
silent
begging
kneeling before them
owned
raped
tamed
maimed
disfigured
imprisoned
disappeared
starved
and to all be feeling abandoned, now:
like they always, inevitably, do
too.
I’m tired of men who brutalize and terrorize–
trans people and women and children
and nonbinary people and
anyone else who appears to be or is actually
happy not being exactly like brutal old and young men–
for sport and
who would clearly prefer at least half of us
imprisoned, driven away, suffering, or dead.
I'm tired of the people who become like them too– cold and hard and dead inside, then, inevitably, cruel– deluded into believing that becoming like stones and throwing stones will keep them safe or happy. It's not better to be the abuser than the abusee. To be the abandoner instead of the abandonee.
None of that works.
I’m so tired
I’m so fucking tired
I’m so tired of all that abusive, patriarchal bullshit.
And yet.
5.
I've noticed.
Have you noticed? That
nothing drains my energy more or
faster than being abandoned
by someone I deeply love
who I believe doesn’t
love me back or much or as well
anymore.
I currently hold the loss and torture and suffering
of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian friends and families,
and the imminent starvation and expulsion of millions
more precious, irreplaceable souls. And the pain of almost 60,000
people locked up by ICE in the U.S. and all their families, friends, and neighbors.
And the stagnant, fetid pain of people who drive to see
the giddily racist and abusive
Alligator Alcatraz sign
to take their photos by it.
And the women who wear crosses
puppets
with bosses and
hands up their skirts.
I hold and weep and release a world of pain daily.
We all do here.
Our country is a puss-filled wound
run by puss-colored beings
bent on world domination and
delighted by wounding.
And yet somehow
somehow
being abandoned by
just one close loved one
hurts more than all the world's pain
passing through me
combined.
What a terrible thing
to have to admit and say out loud.
But that's my truth.
That's what it is
to be me.
So.
6.
Dear everyone,
Everyone I have abandoned,
everyone I have left or blocked
or pushed or let slip
away,
I am sorry.
I’m just sorry.
I’m sorry I had to abandon you.
I know what it is to be abandoned.
I know. And within that pain and knowing, reasons don't matter.
The reason doesn't matter at all. It doesn't.
It doesn't matter that I’ve had to abandon people
to stay safe
or stay sane or to grow or
to stay myself or to hold my immediate family's pain
or to save another relationship
or because I felt like I was drowning and couldn't breathe
or that cutting remarks when I was at my lowest felt like deep stab wounds
or to allow me to more fully focus on those who needed my support
help and attention, that I was being stretched so thin I feared I would break.
Or that I sometimes had to abandon someone just to feel free enough
to breathe truly deep breaths again. Or, for Poet Me to return.
Here, reason
and reasons
don't matter.
The pain of abandonment matters most.
The pain of abandonment matters most.
I hope you found peace
and new people quickly
as you slowly drug yourself back up
to the surface of life, like I’m doing again now.
I hope you have a thousand people
or two really strong women
one on each side of you
who feel like
life preservers
under each of your arms now.
I hope you know joy. Hope you
have all the help
and support
you need.
And I'm sorry.
Around this whole blue-green world
my people say
nobody is free until we’re all free.
Nobody is free until we're all free.
Nobody is truly safe until we’re all safe.
My people dream big, and we don't give up on our dreams.
I would just like to add:
nobody stops feeling abandoned and alone
until we get to be our real selves
until we create communities so honest and loving and
connected and vulnerable and generous
and pain-encompassing and loss-holding,
true strengths,
that we all get to stop abandoning each other.
That day will come.
Feel the ripples moving
out from that place
in the ocean
now.
7.
Our elders stayed quiet, took abuse, covered it up—
silently holding it, imagining they wouldn't pass it on.
They passed it on. Wow did they pass it on.
Welcome to
the United States of Abuse.
Where fake smiles and dead eyes
abound.
Or, they/we left and abandoned their/our abusers—
causing people to feel abandoned
and isolated on all sides.
The United States of Abandonment.
Where we have precious little time for you
and you're definitely
not welcome.
That got us here. Where we are now.
Look to the right, abuse.
Look to the left, abandonment.
These slicing-ourselves-to-bits ways
of ours
don’t work:
this hiding from our emotions
these bloody and stiff upper lips
this hiding how we feel from others
this hiding abuse
this running away from others. Blocking others.
Staying so distant
we can't tell what is really anymore.
This false choice
of becoming abusers or fleeing from them.
If this worked, we wouldn’t feel isolated.
If this worked, people wouldn’t feel so abandoned and alone.
Be so vulnerable to abuse either way–
not recognizing it until it was too late.
Generation after generation
distancing themselves
distancing ourselves, I mean
from misunderstood pain.
What do we do now, friends?
Now that we're the world's largest bully
now that we happily fund genocide and gladly partner
with brutal regimes and for-profit prisons around the world
now that masked fascists pound on our doors daily
and run our neighbors down in schools and hospitals and churches
and in parking lots and streets
while we work two jobs
still can't afford to eat
or see the doctor
or even protest?
What do we do?
How many more people
will we allow to fall into this black hole
of isolation and abandonment?
How many more people will we allow to be
blindsided by abuse?
How many more will we let them push into suffering and fear?
How many more will we ourselves push or pull into despair
just so we don't have to feel so alone
anymore?
8.
Here in the United States of abandonment.
There are so many answers to be found.
So many stories of connection that bind us together.
So many shared joys. So much shared pain. Shared history.
Real history. Not toy story history rewritten by broken toy soldiers.
We hold
so many people whose people have fled abuse from elsewhere
only to now feel abandoned or abused here and so many
whose people have always been abused and abandoned here.
So many people who came here and thrived.
So many standing and still smiling
after hundreds of years of genocide.
The answers are here.
Put your big ears back on.
Get to your feet.
Go out and find them.
Speak your everything to find them.
Everywhere you can.
Weeping and laughter are superpowers
almost everywhere.
And when they aren't
tell wide and wild tales
of them.
I don't have your answers– that's not poetry
and Essayist Me is off right now, on sabbatical,
making plum jam to raise money
to send funds to more families in Gaza.
Take it from me.
Now is the time to double down on your sensitive self:
the self who can sense birds or deer or rabbits or coyotes
well before
they come into sight and who
knows when ancestors are present or
warns her people that a tsunami will be coming
10 days before it happens and
feels their own hidden pain
and their loved ones'
hidden pain, connected, too.
Our most vulnerable selves are also our most powerful selves.
This isn't the time to hide how you really feel from anyone you love.
Forests are burning, cities are flooding
human rights are being shredded
whole nations are starving or crumbling
I just watch ICE drag a kindergarten teacher
away from her children– disappear her– as her husband wept openly and
oceans have been dredged, polluted, and over fished.
9.
Abandonment
is done.
Abuse?
He's through.
Feel
what matters most
and lies melt away,
too.
Ask a scientist.
Ask a petri dish.
Ask broken hearts pumping out
prayer after prayer
wish upon wish.
Now is the time
of the jellyfish.
