I have been crying all my life...

There is a war in me between who I am and how I am, like magnets reversed, repelling, they do not coexist in peace. Which is why living is so hard and so exhausting.

I think of how I am, as based in the physical, in my brain. Who I am is about my values, what matters to me, the soul. My abilities and inabilities are how I am, and who I am is kindness and love.I don't understand what makes us human, and I  don't understand all this pain that is ever present and always has been, in my most successful moments, in my happiest ones, in all the rest.

I used to believe that if saw reality for what it was, that would be enough to change things, but it doesn't, because the pain doesn't go away. Pain wears you down, like the sea on rocky shores. It is persistent and it prevails.

I love writing and crafting imagery from words. Bless the invention of the computer and the electronic dictionary and thesaurus. There is so much beauty and pleasure in finding the words to take the impression, the feeling, the abstract imagery and crystalize it into being with the sounds and rhythm of words. With poetry, there is also the visual placement of the line break.

Victory Buzz is about a race I won, my last summer at camp. It shows how I am. That summer I went to camp I weight 100 pounds and wore size 14 (back then sizes were different) I was chubby. I grew 3 inches and lost 20 pounds. I worked at it intentionally. I used to look at my thigh pressed against the wood of the picnic table I sat at and it looked huge. But by the end of the summer, I actually saw it looking thin. I was fit and muscular and strong. That summer we had junior life saving. I was saving one of the counselors and she warned me that my grip wasn't tight. Made me smile inside to know what was true and then to see so, because when she tried to squirm and sink me she was unable. I impressed her and I was pleased. I was one of the best swimmers. From the start of that year I was given a white cap (the color for the top swimmers). I was the youngest and the first to have started out that way as well. There were a few girls that thought I didn't deserve it. They were jealous. But, I knew I did. One in particular. She lost that race to me and thought I was lucky. I knew I wasn't, I was better, faster, fitter. She came in second, but the race wasn't even close.

I cried easily when I was happy, frustrated, sad, for no particular reason on a dime. No one bullied me at camp, but I knew they looked down on me with distain, even when they were discreet, I knew. At the end of the summer, my family was supposed to go to the world fair in NYC. They went without me instead.

That summer was a moment of blossoming. It was short-lived. Like in the poem. Then there was my oldest brother, who like a little boy, sees a pretty flower and uproots it from the earth, curious, fondling the petals, and then letting go, dropping it on ground, off to doing something new, oblivious.