FormForAll: Clarion Sonnet • skinning genes

Being And Seeker by Elena Ray


skinning genes

Watching this happen to you from afar
is not just distressing but right on par

with not watching me when it happened here.
Caused by stress you might say but I do fear

that, like our height and our brown hair, these screams
pulsing inside us came straight from our genes.

You can choose, of course, to just let it ride
but depression can't be taken in stride--

nor the despair of the weakening soul
that searches for the elusive loophole,

nor the task of the body to survive
the booze and the pills flying this nosedive.

Come back to yourself, sweet being of Light,
before you succumb to your last midnight.

                                                            MLydiaM ~ May 2012


Written for dVerse Poets Pub FormForAll, where Samuel Peralta's (aka Semaphore1) stimulating prompt inspires us to compose a Clarion Sonnet  (please click link for description and information, along with links to other Clarion Sonnets----and certainly do not miss the one written by Semaphore himself).

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Mag 95 -- hitting bottom

In the wake of what had long ago become obvious to his family and friends,

Harold admitted that he had 

"hit bottom." 

He was ready to accept help. 

Though it would not be an easy journey, 

calmer waters were ahead provided he 

follow his inner compass 

and 

stay the course.

                                                                MLydiaM ~ December 2011

Visit Magpie Tales to read other Mag 95s 

inspired by the photo prompt above (image by Mostafa Habibia).

For help click HERE (Substance Abuse Treatment Facility Locator).

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Mag 71 -- like dazzling wavy ribbons

Since being in Minnesota on Father's Day for a family reunion with my deceased alcoholic father's side of the family, I have been processing thoughts and emotions I had about all of us gathered there that day. It was one of the most powerful and poignant days in my life. We enjoyed many laughs and some unexpected tears. We sat on each others' laps and shared the strongest hugs I have ever had. We checked out similarities and celebrated uniqueness. While some talked about what had happened since the beginning of the weekend when they last saw one another, others caught up on the years that have passed when last in the company of one another. We bridged decades, lifetimes with those we had never met.

I stood on the deck looking out at family in the swimming pool splashing and in the hot tub conversing and laughing, their colorful swimsuits and trunks reflecting in the water like dazzling wavy ribbons in the new summer sun. If only the filter of time might weaken one gene for these and future generations, the dark heavy rope that has dragged a few under and to the bottom, and has challenged some of us to untie its knots from our souls, might begin to fray one year and disintegrate eons later. Until then I will remember each of them shining brightly for one another as I pray not you, not you, not you. . .

MLydiaM ~ July  2011

This magpie is inspired by my recent trip and the top image (of Endeavor, Lino Tagliapietra, Columbus Museum of Art) by Tess Kincaid, who hosts weekly photo writing prompts at Magpie Tales. There are many more magpies to read there.


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Lately,

drinking darkness by Phil Hilfiker


Lately, I am sorting thoughts about alcoholism and how it has touched me and members of my family. I don't dwell on it very often, but when I do I tend to dig deep. Inevitably, I read from three topical books that have been the most insightful and enlightening for me in my own sobriety. Each time I gain more insight and am further enlightened. The following excerpt is from one of those three books.

-from A DRINKING LIFE--A Memoir, by Pete Hamill:

If there's another Depression, he said, you'll always work.

My mother said nothing. I was beginning to understand what the Depression had done to both of them. I took the test for the Navy Yard and passed.

That summer, I was in another kind of depression. Day and night, I felt that I'd lost my way. It was as if some long steady tide were flowing out of me, the waters rising in my skull and then tumbling me along with that tide I couldn't control. It seemed absurd to think anymore about being a cartoonist. Or a bohemian. Maybe everybody was right, from my father to Brother Jan: it was arrogant, a sin of pride, to conceive of a life beyond the certainties, rhythms, and traditions of the Neighborhood. Sometimes the attitude was expressed directly, by my friends or the Big Guys or some of the men from Rattigan's. More often, it was implied. But the Neighborhood view of the world had fierce power. Who did I think I was? Who the fuck did I think I was? Forget these kid's dreams, I told myself, give 'em up. Do what everybody else does: drop out of high school, go to work, join the army or navy, get married, settle down, have children. Don't make waves. Don't rock the boat. Every year I'd do my Easter duty, whether I believed in God or not. I'd drink on the way home from work and spend most weekends with my friends in the saloons. I'd get old. I'd die and my friends would see me off in Mike Smith's funeral parlor across the street from Holy Name. That was the end of every story in the Neighborhood. Come on: let's have a fucking drink. 


I didn't know it at the time, but I had entered the drinking life. Drinking was part of being a man. Drinking was an integral part of sexuality, easing entrance to its dark and mysterious treasure chambers. Drinking was the sacramental binder of friendships. Drinking was the reward for work, the fuel of celebration, the consolation for death or defeat. Drinking gave me strength, confidence, ease, laughter; it made me believe that dreams really could come true.

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The land of cool enchantment

My 23rd sobriety anniversary date is October 15 and, because I don’t have a suitable old postcard for the occasion, Old Postcard Wednesday will become Old Postcard Friday this week.

I didn’t go searching for clips of the Hamm’s Beer Commercial at You Tube. Instead one landed in my late-night world while I was glancing at dozens of clips under dozens of topics. With the first thumps on the tom-tom, this small home office off the kitchen illuminated by two blue handmade ceramic lamps I bought for my mother in the 80s at Portland Saturday Market, these days glowing with energy-conserving spiral CFL bulbs, was just a holding cell for the physical me in front of the computer monitor, that was no longer a computer monitor but, instead, morphed into the curved thick-glass, black-and-white television screen housed in a wood cabinet with the speaker section in front made of a thick burlap-type material that took on the smell of cigarette smoke and dust in the old house on Forest Street in Reno.

I was four, five, big six, and a night-owl even then. I loved the TV for the kid’s programs after school and on Saturday mornings, but most of all for the shows at night produced for grown-ups and not for me. My evenings began with The Huntley-Brinkley Report. I was often the sole viewer while my younger sister played in our bedroom or outside, and the woman who stayed with us while our mother worked in the casinos floated around in her dream world of finery and fame. She was with us for years — even after our mother married our step-father, who also worked in the casinos, initially going by Auntie Lorraine and then later requesting that we address her as Mrs. Olson, in spite of there being no Mr. Olson — until one day she wandered up the block to visit a neighbor and they locked us out of the house, telling us to wait on the porch. I led my sister back home and called our step-father at work to tattle on the babysitter. His instructions were to stay inside and lock the doors. I do not remember if he specified that Mrs. Olson should be locked out should she decide to return to our house, which she did, but when her bony fingers furiously rattled the single-pane glass on the front door I kept it locked and yelled out to her, “You’re fired, Mrs. Olson.”

The ease with which I directed our little lives that afternoon must have been helped along by scenes from TV, quite likely even a comedy sketch that I adapted for my own needs in crisis. Plus, my fury had been brewing in a stew of confusion after my honey-colored teddy bear, the one with me in portraits at age three, disappeared and I later saw it one day when Auntie Lorraine took us by her tiny apartment for the first and only time. There on her bed was my bear, along with some of our other lost toys. My memory lapses at that point and I don’t know whether I told my mother about the discovery (surely, she would have believed me and demanded my bear be returned) or whether I was silent because of something Lorraine said. Nevertheless, my actions were supported when the folks came home and I recall three angry adults bellowing at the back gate, all smoking in the dark, and then disbursing after Mrs. Olson received her final pay.

There were other day sitters and some who came in the evenings when our parents were out on the town, which was too frequently in their early marriage when they drank heavily and argued — fought — bitterly. Against that backdrop I was buoyed by cats, books, records, and TV. I go back to this vision of myself watching alone, although I know we enjoyed programs, like The Lawrence Welk Show, as a family including one Emmy Awards show when the announcer was prolonging the suspense for the award for best news show and I blurted out Huntley-Brinkley! just before he called out their names and my mother’s head snapped to the side to look at me and she asked How did you know that? and I said they were my favorites. She’d never heard of them.

But everyone who saw TV in those days and for decades to follow knew the Hamm’s Beer Commercials for the jingle and mostly for the Hamm's bear. This was a special world opening to me. I loved the song. I loved the happy bear. I loved the sparkling scenery, the beauty of nature and wildlife made vivid — that it was in black-and-white was incidental — and I loved the feel-good nature of the entire production of each of the Hamm’s ads. They enchanted and excited me. They mesmerized and calmed me. Even now I feel their effect in a part of me where the darkness hides, where the darkness lightens under their spell. It’s the same place that the power of alcohol later sought out.

Dream Waif: a poem

I watched an intriguing DVD last night titled The Secret (not to be confused with the 2006 documentary based on the mass-seller book recommended by Oprah). The 2008 movie, reviewed here, stars David Duchovny as an opthalmologist who loses his wife, sorta... then his daughter, sorta. The wife has uniquely intense exposure to the daughter's teen existence for a time that provides an opportunity to take inventory of her own life's path. In the mix is a drug scene that was oh so familiar.

The parent-child/parent-teen dynamic is something I lived through only one-sided, never as the parent of a child or teen. Even so, when I read old poems that I wrote in adolescence I've sometimes taken that inventory, reviewed what was there and who I was. Not to understand or help a child of mine, but to understand and to heal the child that was me.

My husband delves deeply into the mystery and pain in his childhood, where I'm more prone to skim over mine. I'm not sure why, but I'm more detached from mine. So when I pulled out this old poem I read it first with the detachment of a critic. Then I read it again and saw that I was describing my budding alcoholism without that being my intention. I see real defiance and fragility here. But the poem wasn't a cry for help. More like a salutation and surrender to something I couldn't control and, in fact, embraced for a long time. As the 23rd anniversary of my sobriety approaches in mid-October, this early poem is a reminder of the grace that separated me from the mess my life became as the years went by.

Dream Waif

Just a thought
before I fade.
Gotta hurry
Before I’m made
As the dream-waif.
They may see
I’m doomed to sleep—
fluffed comfort then
mine to keep
if just allowed to gently fade.
Gotta hurry
Before I’m made
As the dream-waif.

Threatening they creep—
cling—hover
pouncing if they once discover
I’m the dream-waif.

Guards of the ego
with pieces of dreams
bragging of assets—
intelligence—features
and veil their schemes
to remain creep-cling creatures
with only one mission:
Of the dream-waif,
Submission.

The nightmare army
won’t come far
attempting to tear me
off this star.
The warmth is soothing
deeper
deeper still.
It won’t be long
the wait
until
I’ll be encompassed
by the calm;
I’ll be surrounded
with the dawn.

For them, the bog.
For me,
the balm.

© MLydiaM "Lydia" 1969