This all started in a very different place at 3 AM this morning, but I didn’t fight it and let the words flow….
RED
Lately, everything is red
Anger, Hatred and fire are all I feel
I see people, they can’t look at me
My eyes repel them
They are wild, they wander and penetrate
They see straight through you
You and you fragile shell
That protects you
From the burning reality that engulfs me
I go into the room and all is black
Black fades to more black
The windows are cold, too cold to touch
Too cold to open
The air is heavy with the presence of the man In the center of the room
He stands like a tree, hard muscles bulging
Eyes searching….
I stand face to face with him
I breathe his breath, I smell his fear
I see him and I see myself
I see him crack and fall away
What remains is me
And I see the face that I’ve got
It’s broken and uglyI, look again, It’s ugly
I look into his eyes and see the things I despise
I fall to my knees and accept what I am
The room spins, It is falling away
I am left standing alone with myself
I stand in exile and wait for my fall
But it, it won’t come
My red shell of reality squeezes me tighter
And I am burnedI feel consumed, incinerated
Everything is red
Ugly
I wrote the original “poem” when I was 17 for a creative writing class. A couple years later I would refine it into a song my band would play live many times. If I’m being honest about my mindset at the time, I was doing my best to channel my inner Henry Rollins, a person whose music, poetry and spoken word grabbed me in my early teens and well into my forties. I think it took me a long time to be honest about why I liked his stuff, but I’ve come to realize it came from a place of great pain that I could relate to. Yeah we had different individual experiences but the things he wrote about really resonated. The poor self-image, the feeling awkward socially and with girls. I also realized his words helped form some of the foundations of my mask.
For some reason, or maybe all of the reasons, I pulled out an old recording and listened, hearing my own pain and fear that I tried so hard to let out so long ago. Realizing the fall has finally come and I am facing the man in the center of the room again. Except this time he doesn’t look so ugly. He looks tired and defeated, exhausted from holding up that mask and shell for so many years. Defeated by the thought of picking it up again, but also a glimmer of hope that he doesn’t have to, that the person left standing there is ok and there is no reason to hide it. Of course the man in the room was always me, always my struggle to prevent people from seeing the real me, a tool to avoid the possibility of rejection. Ultimately, this rejection of my true self has been the real cause of the fear, the anger the addiction. So im letting go of the mask. Letting go of the fear that someone or somebody many not like me anymore or I won’t be part of everything I once was. Dedicating some time each day to myself, for myself. It’s a weird place to be, but I see value where I once saw only failure.
“our trauma doesn’t want us to show you the parts of us that we don’t feel are lovable. The parts of us that were too much for others. If you see these parts in us, we believe that you will leave as others have. We don’t trust our neediness. We pretend not to have needs to avoid abandonment.” – Joe Ryan
So I’m letting go. Letting go of hate, old relationships, bad memories, hypervigilance, thoughts of retribution and revenge, but mostly I’m letting go of the mask… Throwing away all the things I’ve saved that I might want or need someday. I started today by purging 3500 lbs of crap I’ve been saving around my house and shop. Three trailer loads to the dump and the scrap yard. Boxes of kindergarten papers, scrap steel that I might need someday, tore out invasive vegetation in the yard and discarded baggage. Tomorrow I will drop five boxes of functional clothing, dishes and small appliances at the local thrift shop. This was the beginning of doing the same in my head and my heart. I’m good at tangibles, the abstract is hard for me to grasp, I need to fix things NOW and I know that isn’t possible, so cleaning up the physical world around me was a first step.
And in the end, I’ll probably have to let go of her too. But right now, I believe in the love we shared, that love is worth fighting for and the only way to fight is to walk my path, be true to my changed course and give it time to heal the pain.
JMH
