This ache I live with (a poem, why I wrote it)

This ache I live with

Feeling the distance between me

I take a crucial step forward

And fall into love with myself

This ache I live with is greater than or

Equal to the sum of all the disappointments

Of my childhood

I am climbing a molehill

With an Indian name

I dare not exaggerate

I am a misanthrope, a lover

Of nature who cannot but distrust

The majority of my brethren

Being a lover

Of life, myself, my other

This poem pushes on

With or without me

I have set my course for old age

But must first free my skiff

From its attic mooring

Please help me

You to whom I pray

This is the first poem I have written in months. The truth is, my relationship with poetry has been strained. I gave a poetry reading a little over a month ago that bombed. The poems were too dark and I lost track of the order of the poems resulting in momentary chaos as I shuffled pages to restart my reading. While I was shuffling I had an out of body experience where I was standing next to my-self that was reading, about a foot to the right. From there I listened to myself finish the reading, on autopilot. (There was also a little hypoglycemia involved which can be triggered by stress.) (Right before the reading there was an omen that things were off, that I was off, an omen that I should have paid more attention to but dismissed, which itself was out of character! I was spooning soup into my mouth when I felt something let loose from my left wrist. It was my bracelet which I bought myself at a thrift store two months prior, a string of turquoise and green glass beads, that symbolizes who I want to be.) After the reading I sent emails to 13 of the 15 attendees asking for feedback. The next morning, 5 folks had responded, one of them an old soul-mate, wrote: "I kept waiting for the magic." That was exactly what I needed to hear, and it started me on a quest to stalk the magic in my life and to reignite the magic in my poetry. This enigmatic poem, "This ache I live with", sort of popped out of that quest. It doesn't provide all the answers, but it lets me know that my poetry is committed to birthing a renewed spirit. But it is also saying that my poetry will, if need be, press on and deliver this new spirit with or without me. How can that be? Well, picture Dante, writing his epic trilogy, "Hell","Purgatory"and "Paradise". Even though he is the protagonist in his epic journey through Hell to Paradise, was he in Paradise when he wrote "Paradise"? I would guess not. His poetry went way ahead of him, and that is how our best poetry works. We poets aren't our poetry. Our poems have a life of their own. What happened for me was, in the middle of my reading, I peeled away from my persona that had lost its connection with magic. It was, in a sense, the power of that bracelet that was working on me, retrieving my soul, actually. I still might write some dark poems, and even some solipsistic poems, but the ones I am going to read / perform will not be those.