Ghost of the Phoenix
That’s actually the title to my next poetry book which I have begun and much to my publishers chagrin have let fall by the wayside. My only excuse being that as my editor has said
Your poetry is your soul work
You cannot ever rush your soul work. If I’m honest my ‘Soul Work’ was summarily interrupted by a turn of events I didn’t see coming. Regardless of that, the drive is coming now to work again. Before all this even takes place I finally, after the Nth person telling me
“You should write about your life.”
I begin writing about how I left the west coast of California to land in the farthest tip of the eastern coast of Canada. Only to one and half years later to end up in the Pacific Northwest of the United States broke and alone.
A green anodized Zippo lighter flicks open then closed with an all too familiar ‘snikt’ like how I imagine Wolverines claws sounding in the comic books. I won’t give you the date or time because that’s not important. If I’m honest, I am not sure what’s important anymore. My neighbor who’s a crackhead and was seeing praying in the middle of the highway last week, just asked me if I could cover rent for him. Ten minutes before the lunatic child of maybe six years old knocked on my door and when I didn’t answer she plastered her face to my window where I write like a blowfish and asked
“What are you doing?”
“Working I replied, what did you need?”
We sat there a full minute as she rolled the question over in her head searching for an excuse of human contact.
“My mom needs a stick.”
I quickly answered “OK.” shutting the blinds in the hopes she would leave. She’s now dancing in the parking lot with a polka dot umbrella as the sun beats down making her sweat. All I can think of is the line that keeps appearing in my life over the past three months since I was unceremoniously excommunicated from Canada.
“You couldn’t make this shit up.”
***
I like to lie to myself and tell myself I’m living the true author life. Like what Steven Pressfield wrote about in Turning Pro: Tap Your Inner Power and Create Your Life’s Work
I’m terrified.
It’s easy or at least easier to write about what it’s like to be an author when there’s someone to share the strife and low times.
Something so simple as physical contact is now a monument to humanity.
You don’t search for it, or at least I don’t.
I remember it. Not at all vague but as clear as the first snowfall I ever witnessed. I was in Canada, looking skyward completely baffled that each particle was an individual. For the next couple of weeks I would always strain my neck upwards to stare into the snow falling sometimes with my then pet Pit Bull.
‘Sometimes my then’ will become a familiar term in the following story and that’s just how this unfolds.
I will be cutting the extraneous details and gnawing on the meaty bones of what has brought me here. In reality, it’s a fairly boring life when you live it like I have. If you take the ‘good parts’ and string them together as I will now, it sounds like an incredible tale. I will leave out details; think of it like not seeing the television or movie star using the washroom. You don’t need to see someone in their morning constitutional to know they use the toilet and are just as human as you.
Right now at this very moment if you must know I miss this incredible woman I’ve never met and well that’s the stuff of me that will be added later. I hope she will be a part of this. I’m beyond hoping she will play into this twisted tale of what of I’ve become and risk it all with me. Before we get there, I should tell you how I came to be where I am.
What’s lead me to write this?
Even before that happens, the names and places may or may not have been changed to save the respect or what little respect they think they deserve.
This is my suicide and phoenix rising or a ghost thereof. I want to tell her
“It’s OK, I’m just in love with you for I have found peace within you which I’ve never known but thought I had before. It was all a lie and right now, I feel…very muchly.”
That’s our own little secret, it’s my own and I don’t want to share but it completes this tale of who I am and whom I will become as the music fades into the dying light of a sunset I hope to share with her. Bill Cosby said it best about marriage. Paraphrasing here, ‘You’re asking someone to watch you die, that cannot be normal.’ All I can think to myself, is Robert Mertens killed by a vine snake previously thought to be harmless.
“What a fitting way to go.”
Laying in her arms and closing my eyes with our children about us telling tales like my dad did weeks before he went. Ghost of the Phoenix will document my journey after returning back to the United States and discovering what it means to truly rise from the ashes.