Stress

1. Air

Today the sky is
steely blue with sticky,
white wispy clouds.
it’s a peaceful, yet
subtly troubled sky,
growing grey and garrulous,
gaining weight, gathering girth,
becoming electrically furrowed,
charging a throw with a flash and
a growl,
beginning a dropping of rumbling tears,
mournfully draining a violent change of day.

Tearfully,
I hated tuna when I
was a child,
bananas or blueberries with
sour cream and sugar
was preferred to the pieces of fish that
swam a mayo grotto
between slices of wonder
bread,
since I would retch
at the sight of a bumble bee, wishing
I could seal it in
a baby food jar before it would
buzz me with a brilliant
smile and chase me
and sting me to its ultimate
delight,
singing to me of
blood and family –
stinging me repeatedly,
launching itself at my
fear
from the label on the
tuna fish can.

2. Earth

Today, I stand upon the earth;
below me –
rock plates misaligned,
pressured up or down and
wrenching against each other
like intense
moments,
like whistling sand
and sandy gears
and wrestlers in the moment
of balance,
ready to tip the one into
a fall, exploding
the world and
forcing the one to
face the moment of
no control
at all.

With little control,
I used to sing in whistles
when I sat to sleep
and breath,
when I strived
to fill the spaces
under the phlegm
within my lungs,
to aim for the pot my mother
placed beside my bed,
warning me not to miss
when I would need
to empty my stomach and
make room for
spastic lungs.
I used to look out the window
at the leafless trees
and featherless sparrows,
and see other kids
playing
and running
and jumping, and
at the sound of a stirring within
the chambers of my darkened
cave,
I’d jump my eyes
back to a book,
and plan my flight past the trees
and the city dump
beyond,
to a closet, or a
darkened corner, or a
piss-filled stairway ---
wherever I could flee
the opener of my bedroom
door.
Perhaps,
the book I read would be
enough.

3. Water

The sea tosses back its
surf as it brushes
its head with
rock combs, aiming
its wet strands to catch
wary gulls and
unwary walkers,
ripping the land with
vigorous strokes so
the finished effect is
silken and calm,
patted together,
ready to meet and reflect
the moon
or the sun,
whichever lover meets
its changing temperament and
eroding
care.
She brushes violently and
takes back the beach she
gave as a
gift, while
smiling demurely.

Thigh deep, I exclaimed
“Look how strong the tide is”
to my bride of
one month,
and my two married friends of
four or five,
as the sea sunk its watery
teeth
into me,
pulling and tugging me
into its suckling lair ---
Realization,
like a photo flash, or
crazy, unreasonable eyes,
splashed me cold and shivery, and
I cried to be
saved,
while ripped to a place
where my feet were lost.
City boy, asthma boy, runner
but no swimmer, I tried
some strokes and felt
my strength give in to
the sacrifice of an unknown
angel’s beckoning ---
“Believe in an
afterlife now and
be calm – be strapped
to a rock and
be bled –
lay down on your
back
on a watery
bed
that will suck you,
immerse you,
caress you,
absorb you ---“
The sun smiled back and
I felt at
peace, until
my friend reached me and
tried to swim
to sand.
“Don’t leave me, you’re
killing me” when he could not
succeed
without giving up his own,
and I laid on my back and
closed my eyes, and
tried to, but couldn’t
pray.
When the sea threw me up
on the waterless sand,
as I was hoisted to an ambulance,
I realized,
like a photo flash, or
crazy, unreasonable eyes,
splashing me cold and shivery,
that my marriage
was over.

4. Fire

How many fires
have you built – how
many marshmallows have
you burned, S’mores
for the embers
smoking into a dusky, dimly
fire-lit night,
laughing into your beer and
friends’ gleaming
teeth?
How many homes have you seen
burnt to black, wispy unsafe streams of
smoke, tinder
creaking apart as you
step, a melted
doll,
a piece of
flesh,
a book cover with
ash pages ---
how many volcanoes have
you seen, burping
liquid red-rock into
the blue, hissing and
steaming and singing
of birth, blasting
your face red with
heat,
boiling your eyes of
sight, tastefully
absorbing your
essence as a feast of the
inevitable ---
The knowledge of fire,
it is said,
made man
man.
The knowledge of fire,
of what fire
can do, of
the stress it puts to
rock and metal, of
the life it gives,
the possibilities of
structure
and movement, and
weapons and
war, and
ultimately, an
embrace back into melted
existence, of the
dragon, when like a
puppy that
loves life, smiles
with open jaws, gleaming,
pointed teeth, tongue
red and long, and out,
tasting the air,
tasting you, and joyfully,
with all its soul, pours its
fire
upon you.

I always know when
the fire has died, but
the timing somehow
eludes me.

Once I was in a card shop,
looking for the perfect
expression, and found it
in an empty bag,
begging to be packed ---
another time I found it
on the pages of a
mental book, stories of
scuffed shoes, melted
faces, mirrors that reflected
one face when two stood
before it, war games played on
keys tuned by
inkless emotions, actions
spurred
by the heat of reactivity, broiling
thoughts into
thoughtlessness, charring
the skin of relationships, blackening
the future.

I left at the
wail of an
infant’s loss.

Sometimes it seems that the
canvas
upon which I paint my view of the
world becomes
concrete,
the paints run to the ground, and
searching for my image I so meticulously
enacted,
I become a Peter looking for a
shadow, or a Wendy, to
help me to live
forever,
as a boy.

5. Elemental

One must go on, walking the land
filled with sand, and green,
amidst crawling and running
and dead lying things,
and gaze at the sky, at its
blueness or grayness,
its reds and blacks,
its pinpoints and blinding light,
at the flown and the blown,
and gaze out to sea, to
the riders and ridden, the
fins and the hulls, the
barnacles and mollusks,
the spray, the deep, the
dark,
and walking and gazing and
feeling the fire, or
the fireless – the heat of the
earth and air and sea, at
odds with each
other, enacting
storms and upheavals and massive
destruction, and
growth and rebirth, the moss on the north
side of rock,
the algae on the ocean
floor, the
bacterium in our minds, the
virus lurking and waiting
to emerge,

and I know when I see the fire in
your eyes, feel the
flame within me, feel the
heat on my ego, the hurt of
the boy who missed
the pot and feared
the opening door, the possibility,
the pressure of what
might
be happening, hasn’t happened,
seems to be
happening --- the
rubbing of the
possibilities, like two sticks
rubbing each other on
the tinder of my soul,

and I know we are the
same,
we hurt the
same, we both lived an indestructible
youth, we both gaze upon
wrinkles that reflect
time, but not our forever egos ---
we both see death, and do what we
can
to distance ourselves, and we both
hate hurt ---

The dragon is life’s pet, and its
joy is of the
flight, and the drink, of the
feast and the flame, and as it
gazes on us with its eager,
mischievous eyes, we feel the
stress of
its heat,
and we react.

Bruce V. Baron
Seeker
1/1/06