When I Was a Child, This Is What I Did

When I was a child I drew, I sang
and when I was old enough
I read. I didn’t write.

I tried. I flailed, then failed
daunted by utter incapacity
to find words, any words that might
say something I meant

 

ever haunted, hungry,
possessed by an overwhelming, urgent
yet ultimately powerless rage to communicate

Every Christmas I asked for and received a
new blank diary for the year to come

Each time I gazed with love upon
its pristine pages, resolved afresh
to fill it with my thoughts

 

Then hit the wall immediately, and hard
I struggled, stared at the first bare page
as it blurred through a thickening film of tears
and then I finally surrendered, sighing,
to write after the date “Just routine today.”

By spring I abbreviated it to “JRT”
and filled month after month
with that acronym, scrawled large
with impotent frustration

 

Instead, I doodled, scribbled, drew, let the
lines flow without thought as the tip
of pencil, pen and crayon flew,
filled page after page with sketches

 

of body parts, eyes, hands, feet, faces
images of people and animals but
never landscapes, seldom things
I wasn’t interested in backgrounds
only players

 

I starved for acknowledgment, contact
effected disconnected pictures from my
alienated self, drawing on my innerworld
as substitute for actual reflections of the people
and animals that populated my surroundings

 

My powers of observation were turned inward,
and ’twas self I saw in the fey faces,
pointed ears and great glaring eyes
that stared from my pages.

 

They scared me, dared me to stop,
drew my pencil-point excitedly onward

 

I struggle, still, with that block in my brain
and sometimes must manifest some shock
profound enough to slice through the stuff
that separates my inner world from the
shared world of people and animals,
places and things

 

So I sing, I read, I want, I hunger,
I suck like a magnet with infant passion
upon the attention of those who notice
until they withdraw, depleted, to seek
attentions of less voracious and
more giving others

 

It makes me notice the way I still be
as a child, it makes me notice child self
filling my shelves with denied
soul’s shrieking

 

This insufferable pain is actually ecstasy denied
Such pleasure disallowed converts to agony
become a frenzy of demons wreaking havoc
upon the plains, rivers and seas of self

 

A constant, unnamed background pain
pressures my brain, colours me
with shame hues of purple and maroon
punctures my balloon before it inflates,
makes me wait for my fate to unfold,
places my life on hold

 

And it, the pressure, builds to crescendo
til the release valve blows, allows me
a song, a picture, a poem, a dance,
a chance for eternity’s freedom
until release relaxes me
back into my box

 

Into this paradox I live, makes me
crazy like a fox, freeing me with locks
and trapping me in bouts of freedom

I need more wisdom than I currently access
to pass this moebius test; it twists me
in and out of sane

 

Old Time is devil and saviour of my life
I age and grow at varying rates
racing against the pace chosen
by the majority and called consensus
though my vote hasn’t yet counted

 

I learn, slowly, that though I grow
and appear to age, I am becoming in truth
more youthful, more able, more fluid,
more stable, more magical and more alive.

 

When I was a child, this is what I did.
When I am a child, this is what I do.