Friends of Bill W.

[LeftWriteFemme]

October 5



Jeopardy



Today I tore down the isolation booth. I didn’t live in there exactly; sometimes I stuffed G-d in there and went out for a ride. I left that shack stand for far, too long; a testimony to ill conceived, ham-handed, control freaks everywhere. I said all I wanted was some peace, but a vacuum is not tranquility and escape won’t substitute either. Since the live studio audience has gone home and the house lights are dimmed, I feel pretty foolish for playing round after round on my own. This game was never any fun and the sponsors were death merchants and scavengers whose interest lay in destruction and nothing else. I must not cast aspersions, I didn’t care that the contest was merely an upright pit with a lethal pendulum, I used it as a hideout and a lair, a place whose walls I could keep between me and my Higher Power and an activity I could depend on to keep me free from living a life. It all came to the ground today; I walk over the splinters and shards, I know there has to be a better game and I’m ready to play.





Picture trouble floating away like bubbles on a river

*
MY HEROINE

The corpse that is my childhood
Is mine to protect from the wolves
And rats of denial and collusion.

The infant who commits suicide
In self-defense is my heroine.
The pure thinking of an uncluttered mind
Seizes on the only possible way for me to survive.

Her death at her own hand is my rescue
If the bad had killed her
I would have died with her.

In her plan I was left as the seed
She ejected in her assent
She is gone from this place
I feel her only as the wisp of memory.

The tiny body laid flat on the carpet
Her pressed pinafore somehow more alive than she is
the unfinished business of prevention.

As long as I see her there and do not walk away
From my responsibility and never forget
She protected me with the life she never lived
I am free to live this life.