EMBRACING CHAOS

Come out come out wherever you are!
I know some of you are still in there,
sneaking around the back rooms of my mind,
woven into the fabric of my existence,
secure in the comfort of my routines
and nourished by my unconscious and all too desperate collaboration.

But this time, don't expect my usual complicity
(and don't count on my habitual dependence)
FOR I AM A RECOVERING DELUSIONIST!
I'm onto you, as I'm onto me--and our dirty little secret. You know what?
I have declared a state of Zero Tolerance and nothing can ever be the same.
Listen up. It's over. You're out.

No judgments. No grudges.
I offer a safe right of passage to all delusions that pack their bags,
uproot and leave town today! Hey! Out you come!
You can't hide from me forever, despite your perfect camouflage.
(At least, not now that I know you're there--
though I must say I am concerned at how many more of you there may be).

Understand, it's not--
forgive me for speaking frankly--
that I seek to expose you for the hapless delusions that you are
(though sometimes, in fact, I do have a malicious desire to do that).
It's just that, ultimately, my aim is to live in truth.
And about time!

But please know that in separating from you
the toll on my poor heart will be great--
greater than great, for you've been like family to me.
It seems that you have always been there for me, as I for you,
and in our parasitic co-dependence, you have been my truth, my reality,
and without you, life is filled with fear and uncertainty.

Please understand, I suddenly realize
I don't have time to live life from a false perspective.
Don't you see that my very reason for being is on the line?
So go you must, and go you will - but go in peace,
for you were the very foundation upon which I have always walked,
you were all that separated me from the chaos.

No disgrace, no dishonor, no loss of face,
for we have lived faithful, chaste, to each other bound,
and I will miss you dearly.
Now, the chaos must be faced;
new reality accepted, embraced;
previous comfortable beliefs erased; and you, gone, without a trace.

But how can I wipe clean the windows of my perception
when everything I do is tainted by my own interference?
(Or is this, perhaps, just another false question,
the conveniently unspoken answer to which has served for years to justify
my perpetuation of your existence?)
Woah! Do I like having you around or what? Exposed! I have to confess:

the plain truth is that I conspire to perceive order in a form my fragile self can accept;
I conspire to believe in borders my blinded soul can detect;
I have been harboring and perpetuating delusions within boundaries I dare expect!
The fault is mine, and mine it is to stop the rot.
And I think I can say that I have proffered no pretense, no dishonesty,
no willful attempt to corrupt reality. Simply, it is time for you to go.

In the name of life, I owe myself this kindness, for you are making a pantomime of my existence, and if I cannot be honest with myself at this juncture, then it will be as if I have never been.
And though my heart knows anger and sadness--
both at your existence in my life and at your departure--
I am grateful for the opportunity to see life anew
through a rip in the fabric I have been weaving these years through.

This is a bust! This is a raid! My life is a travesty,
I am totally dis-made. Permanently disarrayed--
(and now pondering, welcoming impermanence as the greatest of gifts
for at this stage, I am embarassed to have lived so long
before bringing you into evictable manifestation,
for I have been sublimely blind, though subliminally aware of your game for decades).

Alas, I fear I have tended to construe things intellectually and am
coming to practical conclusions only now that I have confronted your existence;
now that I have understood the sordid nature of you;
now that I have requested your departure;
and I don't want even the finest imprint of anything that was yours to remain on my mind,
body, heart or soul, nor anywhere in my environment when you take your leave. Now go...

...but please know that your departure wrenches my heart and will pain me ever more,
for I believed in you! I lived by your laws!
And now I feel deceived, as if discovering some terrible treachery, some hideous plot to conceal reality.
I feel ashamed, foolish, naïve, ignorant. You have been lying to me, cheating me!
That's enough now! All delusions must go, for I must will it be so!
(And surely, I must be making headway, for they are falling fast). "You hear that? You are falling fast!"

Their insolent persistence ignites my anger as never before.
I snatch at them, seize them, sickened to the core.
I kick them out, good and hard, bolting the door behind them, screaming:
"bloody bloody good riddance!"
How vilely audacious! How hideously predacious!
They dared to impose their mendacious crap on me? Ha! But then I woke up.

A metaphysical slap in the face;
a brutal jog to the consciousness;
a shockwave of realization and suddenly, I see it all.
I'm hyper-spaced, vertiginous,
and the nausea mounts in proportion to the speed with which the ground beneath me caves in,
as well it would, wouldn't it, when one of the 'big ones' goes.

Bong! Bong! Got it wrong! Falling, sprawling, flesh crawling,
no footholds, no handles, no rice, no sandals,
no bearings, no takers, no candlestick-makers,
no bodge it, no dodge it, no familiar logic,
no way to climb back up onto the banks, the muddy banks,
the slippery muddy banks of the old world order.

Nothing but G-forces, my colon in my throat
and the wondering where it all will end,
as a belting reality check comes flying round the bend:
I have been living my own lies!
And although stranded in chaos, shocked and 'disillusioned',
I am nevertheless relieved still to be alive

given that I had been wandering, naked,
a newborn, striding oblivious through a battlefield of bullets,
and God alone knows how he steered me through.
Where I'm from they say that "God looks after drunks and wee weans",
and I wonder which team he assigned me to?
(It would be equally difficult, and as great an honor to serve in either).

With work, some delusions benevolently dissipate, accepting their extinction,
and I thank them for that from deep within my heart, for there will, I fear, I pray, be many more.
They simply shrug, put out the lights, and gently close the door behind them.
Oh if only they knew that the light goes out on everything as they go…
on everything that I know… everything I do… everything I ever thought was true…
leaving only a cold expanse of darkness in which, for the moment, no warmth may flow, no love may grow, no life break through.

Others think they can just breeze in at any time,
rattling the doors and the windows of my mind.
"Hey! Open up! I'm freezing my behind!"
Well, isn't that tough! Too bad, too rough!
Too much drama, too much karma, too much 'stuff'.
Not by the hair on my chini-chin-chin…I WON'T let you in! Not knowingly. Not now.

And don't think I haven't noticed those of you who have slipped through the cracks,
old dogs into your old home, slinking silently back.
And I, strangely alone, and void of truth or fact,
have unconsciously eased up, certainly been slack,
somehow soothed to receive you, too quick to welcome your return,
relieved not to feel that searing emptiness stretch and burn.

But as I said, don't count on my usual complicity, for my intent is to route you out.
You KNOW I am through with delusions,
even this one, even YOU!
And now you look up at me with tragic, pleading eyes,
and I know that if I emit even one single sign of weakness at this point
it will be my demise. Everything will crack.

So what am I to do with you, now that you are back?
Would you have me take a stick and chase you around my conscious mind
with the intention of beating the holy shit out of you when I catch you?
Don't make me do that, for it would be a mighty hard thwack,
too brutal, and not at all representative of our relationship,
the memory of which should, with due respect, remain intact.

You know only too well that evicting you has been for me a living nightmare.
I urge you, therefore, please leave of your own free will.
Don't make me feel as if I am beating to death an innocent child, a life-long friend
or a loving parent in my desperate bid for liberty and survival!
It is bad enough that I should suffer mourning for the loss of a damned delusion,
so don't try it on! There can be no nostalgia!

The stronger I become, the more it comes to a fight, push to shove, wrong to right,
as threatened delusions dare take me on, dare refuse to be gone, dare oblige me to wrestle
with them my whole life long.
And when, finally, I round them up and beat them to a pulp, they don't die, won't die,
preferring to lie around groaning, crying, putrefying, wounded, bleeding, agonizing, pleading,
greedily feeding on my guilt! My guilt? Well, let them rot!
For if anyone has something to answer for here, I certainly have not. (Well, not any more).

Look!! Did you see that? There goes a trickster!
Same combat, different fight.
Just when I think I have identified and swept them from my life,
like trick birthday candles… woof! They re-ignite.
It takes me weeks to notice their little game,
so accustomed have I become to living in their light.

And look! Look! There flees a sniper! Nasty viscous little viper.
I know he plans to return, but now I'm ready for him for there is much that I have learned.
I don't know how long the scaffold around this newly emerging reality will hold;
I only know I must, for a time, face each day in darkness and cold;
I never know when a load bearing belief will crumble and fall;
but my delusions must and will be identified and eradicated, once and for all.

FAIR GAME

© Janice Johnston Howie 2004

THE RHYTHM OF WET

(Paris, France, January 2000)
Luxuriously warm and dry, under a duvet, in a warm bed, in a Paris apartment, seven floors high,
from the moment of pre-wakeful consciousness I know it is raining.
Even before I move I am aware of an abundant presence of water.
I know the air is heavy, drenched and dripping with it.
Focusing a little, I can hear it gushing through gutters.
6:30. Too dark, too wet, too soon to face the logistics of the day,
I sink, retreat, slip silently back into sleep,
rocked gently by the rhythmic swish of tyres on the smooth, wet road.

(Hunter's Quay, Scotland, UK, July 1997)
And from within the mists of slumber a dream wave swells up
and carries me away to the place I long to be,
where sky and sea merge in a grey-brown broth
until both are somehow lost from view to eyes
that no longer know if they are open or closed.
Darkening, thickening, the air becomes suddenly chilled, stilled, viscose,
requiring to be sipped rather than inhaled,
and soon may be sliced into thick, succulent wedges, slowly to be savored.

And here it comes. I watch it advancing on giant cotton toes,
a great, silent shaft of rain cloud arriving massive and resolute over the hills of Kilmun,
falling into and over itself, turning inside-out as it folds and rumbles,
bowls and bundles, rolls and tumbles down the forested hillside.
A vast vaporball, gaining velocity, gathering volume,
and absorbing the earthy, sticky-sweet scent of peat and pine resin on its way,
pouring down the hill, filling the belly of the valley,
over-spilling into the Holy Loch, pressing ahead, unimpeded, across the bay.

And when its mass is all but upon us, the hissing of zillions of minute fizzing bubbles fills the air
before we are immersed in the broth…
wrapped in an organic, liquid blanket of cloud
so dense it muffles sound and occupies every corner of the perception till there is…
can be… nothing but that,
and the awareness that it is somehow impossible to forget the orientation of the sea.
And on and on for hours and hours and days and weeks,
until everyone has forgotten anything else has ever been, could ever be.

And one short mile further along the coast in the little town of Dunoon,
resilient blue patches bruise over, concede to the onslaught of gloom.
And when that drip-drip-drop becomes more seriously plop, and the sky darkens behind, everybody knows it won't be long,
and if they don't get inside, they'd better be dressed for, and expecting it.
Sh! Can you hear? Those first distinctive sounds. No longer in the distance, but all around.
In every forest, over every river and sea,
in every city and town in my memory the rain is starting.

Dropping at random, falling awry, like big, fat, bouncing, bedrunken bluebottle flies,
great voluptuous water-bombs of liquid crystal plummet, shuddering, from the sky,
undulating outrageously, bursting, exuberant and effervescent, into my eyes.
And as the water pours down over my cheeks and the rivulets reach my lips,
as if by some remembered, kindred reflex, a small pink tongue extends to catch the drips.
Drips which, in themselves, cannot but reminisce…their memory charged,
as clear as yesterday, with the haunting presence of their first love, first life…
3,500 million years ago, and the miraculous advent of microscopic bacteria.

And suddenly it's fully upon us.
Shoppers scatter in all directions, diving into doorways, cramming together under bus shelters.
Businessmen in suits and shiny shoes dash across roads between cars, grimacing,
with only a copy of "The Scotsman" to protect them from the elements.
Prepared and well rehearsed, mothers in sandals sigh, switch automatically into reverse, negotiating pushchairs, backwards, through the weighty swing doors of suddenly busy department stores,
while, outside in the besieged streets, old ladies are riding rodeo, holding on hard with white knuckles,
shocked and invigorated as the winds unleash the animal in their umbrellas and under their tweed skirts.

(Paris, France, April 1998)
Another place another time, behind the scenes, still mine,
already anchored in the day, some part of my mind is awake and getting on with business.
It is brokering the requirements of a day of formal meetings
against the need for wet weather clothes.
It is pondering, preparing, strategizing in the certainty of heavy traffic
and a journey through Paris that will be tedious.
All too soon my little pink Renault Twingo will join an endless flood of cars that will,
nose to tail, as dog to bitch, navigate the narrow city streets,

crashing through big black puddles that explode triumphantly,
throwing up dirty water onto freshly laundered, disgruntled pedestrians on their way to work,
not long awake, but already performing energetic gymnastics…
bounding away from the kerb-side at each oncoming car,
jumping the concierges' carpet damns,
alas not always able to avoid the stream of water
that every day flows along the caniveau
but today fancies itself a mighty torrent.

Just five more blissful minutes wrapped in downy dreams before I seize the day…
linear consciousness drifting away on a rising tide of water memory
where time and space fuse together,
and every configuration of place, époque and weather,
from here and there and then and now co-exist side by side,
their heads collide,
their contents meet
on the busy street of the continuity and simultaneity of life.

(Raubsville, PA, USA, May 2002)
Another time another place,
the swollen river, growing fat,
stretches wide her banks, a Delaware cat,
her tides rising, her rich brown waters soon to be breaking.
Endless meandering mother of the ages,
doing naturally that which she has done throughout time,
graciously receiving and ingesting death,
and of it, perpetuating life of every kind.

(East Molesey, Surrey, UK, 1965)
Eleven thirty in the 'stockbroker belt' several miles south west of London
and the skies remain obstinately dark.
In steaming classrooms, bright with neon, little girls giggle and squeal
as thunder rumbles overhead.
And though nothing can be seen through windows,
streaked and misted with rain and condensation,
the regular, distinctive shchhhrrr of big, rubbery bus tyres reminds those, still not quite dry,
of the shivery wet world to be faced again at four o'clock...

Having received a good dousing on the way to school
and subsequently confined to classrooms,
the children have become giddy and silly,
their hysteria increasing incrementally
in relation to the diminishing patience of their teachers
and fuelled by the prospect of wet weather lunch procedures.
The building is electric with energy
and pungent with the smell of damp wool,

as pullovers and socks gradually relinquish the humidity that seeped in through coats
now hanging heavy and stiff in the cloakroom, and though shoes
that will continue to bubble and squelch delightfully throughout the day.
The time-worn floors of the assembly hall and hundreds of desks and chairs
absorb the dampness, and in return release the familiar, comforting odor of old wet wood
known to so many generations of children,
while the sensible, savory smells of meat pie and boiled cabbage
fill the corridors as they have for a hundred years.

(Prestwich, Manchester, UK, 1982)
An elastic snap and I am back in Manchester,
faithful host to the rain.
5:30 of a weekday morning,
waiting, timely, at my first bus stop,
my long dark hair still dripping from the shower
having fallen into ringlets, now icing over,
clanging gently together in the freezing rain,
and please may the bus be on time.

Four stops down the road, a small bent figure in a flat cap hoists himself up onto the 96.
"G'mornin' driver!"
The bus pulls out brusquely shunting him up the aisle.
He grabs a post to the right, a seatback to the left,
finally falling, gratefully, into the vacant seat next to me,
expelling air with a great "puff!" and showering me with water from his raincoat.
"Oof! 'Allo Jan! Kiss!" He double-points to his cheek with a crooked, directive finger.
I lean over and place a dutiful peck on his crinkled skin.

"Lousy morning again. Soakin' wet. Soakin' bloody wet.
Walls a’ wet. Furniture's wet. Beddin's wet.
Never a chance to dry stuff out round 'ere.
And look at you gel! Wet 'air again and still no 'at!
'Ow many times do I 'ave to tell yer? Sixty percent o' yer body 'eat escapes through yer 'ed.
Yer a fool unto yersel'. Ye'll 'ave chronic bronchitis before ye know it,
and then ye'll 'ave the pleasure o' bein' short o' breath, like me, f' the rest o' yer life!
Short o' breath an' soaking bloody wet."

And one day, as every day, between two bus stops,
head down, eyes scrunched, shoulder to the weather,
climbing the hill and over the bridge,
the wind came up and wheeched his flat cap out into the darkness,
and down into the black canal below…
and I realized… shocked and open-mouthed like a child before absolute nudity…
that in all the time I'd known him,
I had never before seen his naked white scalp!

(The Isle of Bute, Scotland, UK, 1961)
A moment later, in my childhood home of Rothesay,
a small, plumpish girl stands on a slippery rostrum in a kilt and dance pumps
beneath the teaming rain, her hair scooped up high, tied tight with ribbon
and nailed to her head with "Kirby" grips.
An expression of intense concentration occupies her streaming wet face as she
strains not to look down at the crossed swords beneath her clumsy, bounding feet,
her ribbons bedraggled, pigtails fallen and dripping, her head filled with counting,
and her soul at one with the haunting bagpipe.

(I-78 East, Clinton, New Jersey, USA, November 2002)
And I could have stayed there forever dancing,
but am startled from my reverie somewhere before the New Jersey Turnpike.
A horn – urgent – repetitive - critically discordant, as I am inhaled dangerously close
to the thundering wheels of a gargantuan truck… then another, and another.
Thousands of tons of steel hurtling break-neck through filthy weather…
vast racing cargo ships, throwing up solid walls of water in their huge wake,
in which tiny cars are tossed about like chips in the gutter…flimsy sailboats
with soft-shelled captains, tacking their way to life or death between pitiless, mighty tyrants.

(New York, USA, Paris, France, Dunoon, Scotland, UK)
Perspiring, exhausted, the storm subsiding,
I emerge from the Lincoln Tunnel at the Pont de l'Alma,
and inch into the Place de la Concorde,
where traffic - needless to say - is at a standstill.
Rising from the depths of dreaming, aware of the discrepancy,
I feel I brace myself a little, knowing I must go there soon…
Safe now, in my little pink car, I light a cigarette and turn patiently,
absent-mindedly to stare through the window out across the bay…

but there's still no sign of Gourock emerging from those muddy skies.
And suddenly, a tiny corner of the huge woolen grey curtain lifts a fraction,
and there hangs the Kirk of St. Mun

teetering on the edge of an invisible peninsula,
a finger of sunlight very specifically upon it,

contrasted against the blackened skies,
a shining arrow of hope transpiercing a double rainbow,
with colors as rich as the heath.

© Janice Johnston Howie 2002