Looking Back

A friend has a stream that's set up like a radio broadcast on his site--changes the music every few days. You read his commentaries while you listen.  Tonight  he had the Beach Boys on.

Sitting here listening, I found myself going  back in time. The Beach Boys...everybody's soul mates ......sand, beaches, the carefree times of our lives.....back to days when I had my health and a body that would hook men by the chin and tug them along behind me. I plan to buy a Beach Boys CD someday to remember where I've been and know that even though that's gone, it's still part of me, tucked away inside somewhere.

Cried a bit as the tunes dug their way in. A good cry. The kind that releases, like when you see the ocean turn pink in the morning on an early morning bike ride, or when you are lying in bed with a man you love and he looks you in the eyes, strokes your hair and tells you he loves you.

I sometimes fear my days of glorious sunrises and gentle loving are forever gone. I hope not.

Yes, I'm being maudlin, but I'm also being real. Sometimes the two aren't the same. Tonight they are.

As I say in my poem, Changes, about the illness that plagues me, 'I've come to uneasy terms with the changes' --kind of like the old tv show that used to announce, 'This is your Life' and out come the ghosts from your past to tell you magical things that once were and never will be again, but then something  inside you brings you back to the now.... Hope sits in your lap again like a newborn baby, fallen out of the sky of your despair.... and anything can happen. 

Even miracles.

What does this have to do with poetry?  Everything. 

And nothing.

Pris
6/14/2001

(excerpted from a letter to a friend)

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