Hurting, Part 2

Kiss Off: Poems to Set You Free
by Mary D. Esselman, Elizabeth Ash Vélez

(Page 2 of 2)

Perhaps that's why the woman in Deborah Garrison's “Worked Late on a Tuesday Night” is alone and forlorn in the deserted streets, trying with no success to hail a cab home. This is not the first time she's been here, cold but “too stubborn to reach/into [her] pocket for a glove.” Seems she's too stubborn to reach, period. For protection from the cold or for a better life than what she's got. She knows she's “not half/of what [she] meant to be,” so why doesn't she change her life instead of just “cursing/the freezing rain”?

Why? Because of a little thing called pride. Who wants to admit, “My life is a disaster, and every little part of me feels broken!”? We made the choices that led us here. We never meant to be alone and heartsick, but we did choose this job, this city, these relationships. We thought we were building a life for ourselves; now we're supposed to realize that instead we were slowly crumbling inside, helping along the decay of our ovaries and the dilapidation of our souls, à la Emily Dickinson's “Crumbling Is Not an Instant's Act”? That's outrageous and unfair and infuriating. How could we have known it would all work out this way? What should we have done differently?

And even if you do swallow your pride, even if you do admit you feel used up and useless, like the gum-decayed mother in Elizabeth Ash Velez's “Thursday, 11:00 A.M.,” or smushy and rotten like a pear spoiled “from the inside out” in Jane Kenyon's “The Pear”-then what? You're supposed to have the strength and wherewithal to just chuck everything and start over?: “Okay, this life sucks, so hmmm, I know what I'll do-I'll just quit my job and move somewhere perfect and do something much better, never mind that I haven't a clue where to go, what to do, or how to pay for any of it! Yippee, it's a plan!”

Not likely. At this point in Hurting all we know is that we've had enough, and we're too defensive and confused to do much about it. So instead of radically changing the big things in our lives, we usually opt for making last-ditch efforts to change the superficial things. Maybe if we tightened our torso, we'd feel more in control, so it's off to Pilates class. Maybe if those frown lines disappeared, we'd feel less anxious, so it's off to the BOTOX doc. Like the girlchild in Marge Piercy's “Barbie Doll,” we run “to and fro apologizing” to ourselves for not being the person we always dreamed we'd be. As if we're offering one last desperate sacrifice to the God of Happiness, we cut off our noses to spite ourselves. There, I've done everything I can, we think. Now give me a better life!

And when no better life materializes, we truly fall into the kind of despair William Butler Yeats describes in “The Second Coming.” We can't fix ourselves, we decide, because everything falls apart-our bodies, our lives, the world. No center holds anything together; it's all anarchy. So why bother trying to be the “beauty of the world, the paragon of animals,” why bother trying to be some perfect Gap person in a shiny little Pottery Barn life? Like Hamlet, we tell ourselves there's no point. The world is nothing but a “foul and pestilent congregation of vapors,” and we amount to nothing but a “quintessence of dust.”

Okay, fine then, you think. I'll stop trying to please everyone else. I'll stop blaming myself for everything wrong in my life. I'll stop worrying about the misery of the world. Who needs any of it, anyway-the sea and trees, red ripe tomatoes, office blowhards, artsy posers? As poet Deborah Garrison eloquently says, “Fuck them all” (“Fight Song”). Or as poet Etheridge Knight more delicately puts it, “fuck/the whole mothafucking thing” (“Feeling Fucked Up”).

So! Terrific! The Hurting poets have done such a good job of expressing all your sorrow and outrage that here you are feeling like a one big F-word piece of dust. This is supposed to make you feel better?

Well, we think it's a start-at least you're acknowledging your pain. It's real, and it hurts, and you're sick of it. The trick is how to move on from here.

What you don't want to do is stay trapped in this fuck-you frame of mind. If you isolate and alienate yourself from the world, you'll become the creature in Stephen Crane's “The Heart,” squatting in a desert of your own making (like an angry loser on Survivor). Sure things were bad before when you were sitting in that cold graveyard or being pelted by the freezing rain-but is this really an improvement? You've felt frustrated in your efforts to evolve into a fulfilled, happy person, but did you really mean to devolve into this-a naked, bestial monster eating its own bitter heart out?

Of course not. Ultimately what you want is what the speaker in Knight's poem is pining for-something and someone to love, so that “[your] soul can sing.” Allow yourself to rant-fuck 'em all-but then get out of Hurting, fast. If you want gg to love life again, you'll need that heart of yours, and the less bitter, the better.

Love

She tries it on, like a dress.
She decides it doesn't fit,
and starts to take it off.
Her skin comes, too.

-Lola Haskins

Fulfillment

For this my mother wrapped me warm,
And called me home against the storm,
And coaxed my infant nights to quiet,
And gave me roughage in my diet,
And tucked me in my bed at eight,
And clipped my hair, and marked my weight,
And watched me as I sat and stood:
That I might grow to womanhood
To hear a whistle and drop my wits
And break my heart to clattering bits.

-Dorothy Parker

Copyright © by Mary D. Esselman and Elizabeth Ash Vélez

About the Author

Elizabeth Ash Vélez lives in Washington, D.C.