High Exposure.

I'm in bed again today; other than reading a trashy novel and playing the occasional silly game on FB, I'm not doing anything, other than think.  So...what to write today...?   Well...the closest I've come to work is a bit of light editing.  I found some poems I wrote several years ago, and have been rereading and amending, somewhat.  Most of them focus on my childhood.  I make no secret that I had the childhood from hell, but I rarely share the details.  These poems, though, look at that.  I've been debating in my head whether or not to share any of them.  I have a profound dislike of work that pretends to be art, when what it really is, is therapy. That said, I think that I have enough distance now, that I can look back on my childhood and see it for what it was, and hopefully, to describe it without histrionics.  So, today's creative act is a poem.

Remembrance.

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,

Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.  Omar Khayyam

The worst of it is hidden in the dark,

Where nobody at all can ever find it;

The bad things, (like the fights, the slaps, the sobbing

On the bedspread til I slept still sitting up,

Chastised for some infringement

That I cannot now remember, and would not have been

That much), all those bad things I have brought into the open, understood, accepted,

Shrunk to their proper size.    The randomness of it all

Is like my childhood, rule today,  reverse tomorrow,

Punishment inevitable as Mister Frost in winter, icing

up the windows from inside.  At the time, my sister

was so sure that he was real, wanted to make him pay

For every sharp waking, frozen, in the night...

But she grew out of it.  Eventually, I learned

That every pleasant moment had its darkness,

A word, a slap, a scratch, until I cried,

Then, 'something to be cried about'...so

I grew up convinced that all the good things

Do not last, may be stripped away by anyone

At any given moment,  while happiness,

Like Jack Frost, lived in books.

Pleasant moments rarely come to mind:

So linked to darkness, little is remembered.

Snippets of my past, all coalescing. Adam

And his pandrops, Auntie Bell, high tea (with more

than one bit of cake).  More pandrops in the kirk

From Auntie Ebbie on a Sunday, purloined

From her brother, a surreptitious sharing, with

No crunching.  I really don't remember

Any more.  There must be something.  Surely

There must be something.  Clouds have silver linings,

Sun with rain brings rainbows: surely there were more?

I think every artist aims to share something of themselves with every piece of work. This feels like the ultimate in exposure in comparison with visual art, where meanings are cloaked in metaphor and subtlety. Words are much harder to work with for just that reason; give me a paintbrush any time.