Bless me reader, It's been a week since my last confession...
A week and no new rejections. No new submissions. Sure, some writing including a couple things with some promise.
I confess I stopped for a Diet Coke at Casey's on the way home. The vwet nice lady at the case register waved me off and said you are good. Very nice of her, Unfortunately, it is very watered down and like an addict I'm drinking it just the same.
Working on some ideas about my voice - I confess, very rough so far but it will get there.
Sunday I started on Ozempic. I have Diabetes, and I was taking. two oral diabetes meds and an Insulin pen. We dropped on of the oral meds as I started Ozempic. I confess it has been really strange. My stomach mostly feels kind of full all the time. Sometimes a bit of nausea. Nothing I eat really tastes right. I had a bowl of Maple Malt-O-Meal for breakfast and that was the first thing that. kind of tasted normal. It was enjoyable and that is a first since Sunday.
I confess I am wavering between a salad and stuffed peppers for dinner.
It's 78 in the house and that's not because that is my preference. That is because of our fascist energy company that feels compelled to not cooperate with my desire to feel comfort.
Thought for the day....
" We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don't know." W. H. Auden
That question reverberates in my mind every night. As a poet, I ask myself whose story is this to tell? I'm not among those constantly wandering in search of safety for the next few hours. Wondering then, where to next? I'm not clutching my stomach to pain of emptiness in a body wasting in the drag on it as it as it tries to pull some kind of strength from nutrients that aren't available.
I'm not having to close my eyes as I step over body parts that are barely distinguishable. That every breath I take is filled with a mixture of dust, of soot particles and the sulfur of explosions. The smell of death that is always an undercurrent. I know of these things but I don't actually live then, so it's not really my story to tell.
The story that is mine to tell is none the less painful. It is the story of a mixture of anger and sadness. It is a frustration that even as a poet I cannot seem to find the correct word to convey that sadness because sadness is not. good enough. It's more than that... it's not even despondency, it's overwhelming, it's grief. It is seeing so many photos and videos that they have become a collage of images in my brain. And as this goes on, my anger grows and it is hard to keep it under control because it is American Tax Dollars, Billions of them that has been feeding this ugly vial right-wing Zionist government that has made the decision to choose genocide on the people of Gaza.
That anger is fermented by the inability to stop our government's ongoing support of Netanyahu, of Bezalel Smotrich, of other Israeli government leaders and the IDF who are executing a campaign of ethnic cleansing so that they can clear the Palestinians out of Gaza and the West Bank, one way or the other and finally take their land as their own, just as they have been illegally doing in the West Bank now for years.
There is a deep pain, deep sadness, unspeakable outrage that America has played a roll in this. The deaths of women and children. The Starvation. The inability to say to the Palestinians, this was not my wish. This was not collectively the desire of the American people. It was the inexcusable actions of many who thought they were doing something they should do, because they have tried to defend Israel for so many years they didn't see that their actions were doing to a whole nation of Palestinians. There is no excuse for these misguided actions.
So, my nights are filled with the anger of our involvement. With the sadness for a whole generation of Palestinian children what are being lost to death, to being maimed, to being orphaned, to a lifetime of trauma, as well as the remainder of the civilian population of men and women who suffer this unspeakable genocide. That is the story I must tell.
The story of the Palestanian people and the story of the Americans who have not asked for the roll in their genocide are parallel stories. Different, yet the same. They are stories that must be recorded for history. Each must be told.
