Why I Tried to Heal - Revised

Dear friends 🍂 🍁 🪶

I hope you’re as safe & well as you can be. :)

I’m still thinking about friendship—residue from last week but also because I had an incredible conversation about relationships & grief with someone I deeply admire (it will be published tomorrow, when our August issue drops @ The 44 North).

Though I wrote the first draft of this poem over a year ago, I’m still sitting with the same question: Why have I tried, at least, to heal? And from what? There are many reasons, but for me, a central one has been knowing that my wounds have wounded. How can we minimize this, while also feeling/experiencing our pain fully with others? The poem below remains in progress in this regard, but I thought you might be interested to see its iterations.

Thank you so much for reading, as always. Please take care of yourselves (as well as you’re able). ❤️‍🩹

With care & gratitude,

Mik

after “On Poetry & History” by Aracelis Girmay 
 
My people pulled away, perhaps,
recoiling from their ache—
from the persistence of mine. Over time,  
maybe, I asked too much: to digest raw pain, at best undercooked.
  
It was true, then, that I couldn’t carry much on my own, begging them 
to lift and slacken the skeleton I dragged 
around my bedroom of ticking alarm clocks. 
 
And with such love they tried, only able to bury it alive
under snow so soft to the touch, so heavy as it fell. 
 
The bones sleep, now, 
beneath my bed each winter,  
unable to live: unable to die:  
unable to live: a body to hide.  
 
The white covers melt every spring. And I look into a familiar face:  
What’s buried alive doesn’t die, never untethers.  
It continues coming back
to life: clockwork until I give it a body 
to survive above ground. 

• A new dispatch, from St. John’s, Newfoundland.

• The next installment of my fairytales-in-verse series: “The Little Mermaid” - Part 7.

• For the one-and-only, wonderful Conscious Writers Collective, I write previews for our upcoming guest speakers! Take a peek here.

• Full archive here 🫆❤️‍🔥