ManicDDaily

Here’s a new poem (too long–sorry–and still very much a draft), written for dVerse Poets Pub “Poetics” challenge relating to comics.    The drawing (done on my iPhone) doesn’t really suit the poem, but I couldn’t resist using it.

Power of Choice or Need

My childhood comic of choice was Archie and heroine
Betty, (fellow blonde and would-be
do-gooder), even though doing good,
in those comics, seemed
synonymous with disappointment.

Of course, the disappointment, was only in the long-lashed eye
of the short-sighted; those impatient
grasping sorts who did not
understand that good-hearted losses,
like all karmic set-backs, must turn golden (i.e. blonde)
at the end, as the universal
balance of good and evil (i.e. Betty’s cute turned-up nose vs.
Veronica’s snooty turned-up nose) righted itself, and a date
with Archie was achieved.

But now that I have no hope of cinched-in waist,
parabolic breasts, or a date with even a
rather bumbling teen throb, my sites turn to the super, those
tragic but helpful figures, only I think
that if I could grow a super power of choice or need, it
would sprout not in my limbs, but inside my heart, taking
the crud of resentment
as its Krypton;
transforming the sting (recurrent)
of abandonment into
the spark of a magic spider’s
teeth.  (With what else
do they bite?)
Morphing the hurt that embeds the claw
into the wide yaw
of empathy; telescoping
that chopped controlling beat into
a galaxy of embrace whose
planets orbit some other sun, where
there are no black holes, and where love, like other
universal forces, can be found in the radial outreach
of just about everything (sound waves from dropped pin,
ringed water round skipped stone, mossy antlers on
rutting stag, maple branches in
wet snow, the listening
consciousness).

It would be a strength, I think,
inked in the unhealed, unhealing heart, allowing it
to flow with the currents of uncertainty,  to
fly vulnerable.