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by bcmiller2014

PTSD

I was derailed that day, steel
wheels spinning sparks until
they tipped and ran to nowhere
in the air. Trains are funny that 
way. So secure, but for a rail, 
and moving so fast they don’t 
even know they’re airborne 
until they hit the ground. 
It was only a spike, a missing 
connection, a missed wish and
a fear and off I went, unconsenting,
in the dark. 

There should be a warning, some 
kind of system that would tell me 
ahead of time, but what should be
is merely whistling ahead, someone’s
daydream, a Turing computer with-
out all the parts. 

I was there. Now I’m here. I owned 
my own body, spoke my own 
words and then, as one spark lit
a bit of grass, I was all outside 
myself, watching. Thank God
for people who see me, who find 
me floating there, find my hand,
and pull. I am dependent at times,
but otherwise, I am a train. 

by bcmiller2014

Elf Warrior, Bunny Lover

I decided to wait a couple days before writing any more. I’ve been depressed, and it’s shown in my poetry. Who really wants to read “Happy new year! We’re all going to die!”  It may eventually be true, but it isn’t particularly helpful to dwell on it. And if I’m honest, death isn’t the real problem anyway. The difficulty is in how to live life fully, and how to keep facing all of life’s disappointments and troubles without becoming disillusioned, angry and generally grumpy. I interact with people who deal with these challenges on a visceral level whenever I ride the bus or walk very far downtown. Seattle’s center is wonderful.  Nevertheless, it is a collection area for human beings who’ve suffered things I can only imagine, and been filled with so much hurt that there’s no room left in them for joy. Or at least this is the way it seems. 

Yesterday we went to see The Hobbit. I read the book once when I was a kid. I read the Lord of the Rings trilogy seven times. The Hobbit just didn’t grab my imagination to the same degree. Nevertheless, I found myself tearing up as the “good guys” triumphed over such obvious evil in the movie. It wasn’t fully logical, getting misty over an Orc beheading, so my own emotions caught my attention. 

Today we saw “The Imitation Game.”  It was so tragic on so many different levels. I weep for Alan Turing. There’s so much in the world that’s heart-breaking and broken and even what you might call “evil,” although the last word makes me squeamish. I think we’re too ready as a society to ascribe that word to individuals when in the vast majority of cases the fact is that when people are hurt, they hurt other people. I would argue that most atrocities (and atrocities they remain) are products of brokenness and admittedly poor to horrible decision making. 

This makes the world a much more complicated place than I originally thought.  I was taught that everything is black and white, concrete and absolute, and that people who believe otherwise have been lured by “the world” into a system that allows grey areas to exist. The truth as I see it is that we live in the world, with birth defects, human trafficking, homelessness, PTSD, mental illnesses, physical illnesses, loneliness, poverty, climate change, racism, pollution, and a host of other horrifying realities. All of these are enmeshed within systems that deal only partially with the causes and effects of each of these things. Sometimes we even live inside systems that nurture some injustice or another in the name of economic progress or blind tradition.  The suffering seems endless, and the grey areas irrefutable. 

I have watched my own mother battle daily pain for my entire life. I’ve watched my father, emotionally unequipped by his upbringing, as he’s worked three jobs and kept a stiff upper lip the entire time, never confiding in a friend or leaning on anyone else for anything including encouragement. Of course I’m not angry with them for how they’ve emotionally harmed me along the way (or at least not fundamentally so), but I’m certainly outraged at disease, and broken social systems and pain and loneliness and despair. I’m entirely pissed off that people can be on earth for over 70 years without ever really living.  So when I watch some kick-ass elf chick kill an Orc, something that is so obviously ugly and deeply wrong, I wish so fervently that I could do the same thing. I want to whip out my glowing elf blade with runes enscribed on it and slice that hideous creature’s head off. 

I know. Kind of gruesome, especially for someone who loves baby bunnies and feels bad for buildings when they’re neglected. But of course, it’s because I love so much that I feel this way. I want to protect those I love with every ounce of strength in me. Instead, I have to accept the fact of the survival of the fittest, the carnivorous circle of life and the human incursion into nature, with all its economic and humanitarian complexities. If someone I love gets sick I want to bomb the hell out of their disease, but I can’t. If someone of color is treated unjustly in the courts, all I can do is sit in town square holding a sign. I’m relatively helpless on a dangerous and unpredictable planet. Just once I’d like to have something in front of me obviously in need of extermination, and have the ability to beat the fucking hell out of it. It would be clear. I want to be an elf warrior, damn it, but I can’t. I have to watch, accept, understand, let go. 

I don’t know where exactly God is in this equation. Maybe he’s in our love for each other. Maybe Jesus is wailing with us in our loss and confusion and pain, but I find myself empathizing with Jesus’ disciples, who were really expecting him to blow the imperialist Romans to hell so justice and peace could reign on earth. I know the answer is much more complex than that. For one thing, there’s plenty of injustice without the ancient Romans.  I “get” Jesus sacrifice for all people of all time so everyone can see God’s love. I just can’t seem to separate myself from the here and now, and right here and now God feels far away and uninvolved. So I guess this is an invitation to a power infinitely greater than myself who seems historically to take a mysterious interest in the human race. I’m inviting you, God.  Show up. 

by bcmiller2014

January 1

There’s so much pressure 
on the first day of the year,
perhaps why half of us get
drunk. So many hopes
that this will be better than 
the last.  If life were a tree 
each year would come 
swirling singly down, golden
or red or downright brown
when there hasn’t been
any rain. I’m looking for
rain this year, a nice Seattle
mist to cloud the air and
give everything a bright
shine. Clean air. A slower
pace while we sit at the
fire and stare, thinking of
words that describe how we
feel when we’re together,
and sharing so we’re really
not alone. Too much sun
and there’s no color at the
end. To be clear though, that
isn’t a metaphor for suffering. 
I’m not running toward pain
like some brutal ascetic 
fundamentalist nut. I just
want life with some color
in it, damn it, and not just
because I’m burned or 
bleeding. I want rain and 
some sun and ranunculus 
running wild. Which is why
we have champagne and 
Jesus, I suppose. Because 
all we’ve really got is a 
fragile tree. 

by bcmiller2014

The Illusion (w/a nod to the Tardis)

“So many things are bigger
on the inside,” she said and
ran to open the door. “Things
will never be dull,” her grand-
father said when his eyes 
could still summon a twinkle. 

Right, both of them. Out-
side-in all around set
spinning with monsters 
from under the bed and 
the wolf with a red bonnet
on. And friends, she met
them, too, of course, with 
their pink hair and house 
pigs and all their very own
cages. She wondered if
everyone had a cage, but
only had to decorate. 
Maybe some called it home. 

Then spinning about and
around again she flew, with
a complete absence of
bedding, mind you, hoping
at once for more of the same
and a stationary room with
an address she could use for
mailing. All an illusion. A
motionless room still glides
through space around a 
flaming, gravitational well in
a tiny corner of the universe. 
So she grabbed the rail and
hoped to God a mad man 
from the sky would save her. 

(So much for not being abstract. Sometimes I just have to
be me)

by bcmiller2014

12 Stories, 18 years and a Thousand Times

The men and women on the street 
are cheering and blowing those
things like kazoos that go 
by a different name. Some 
people are stuck in their 
cars for the fireworks display,
sitting helplessly in rows 
while the excitement happens
elsewhere. My cat is 
startled by the firecrackers,
his ears back, tucking down
his whole body and then 
jumping to the windowsill to 
see what can be seen. He’s
on the other side of the fireplace 
from us, where we’re doing the
same thing, 12 stories up, with
buildings blocking the view. 
I can’t tell if we’re glad to 
see the new year enter or
happy the old one is done. 
I hurt you, just trying to 
love, and you hurt me just
trying to be. We’ve done 
this, eighteen years now. 
I want your hand but
can’t find it. Maybe this
is the year we find each 
other, glancing over dinner
and seeing something new
we’ve seen a thousand times
before. I miss you when we
eat apart, at the same table. 

(Sometimes I really do try not to be too
Abstract)

by bcmiller2014

Short Life

When I’m done here I won’t have children, to continue drawing my line. I’ve never really understood the comfort in that, anyway, except some of my stuff would wait a generation or so before ending in a landfill.

We breathe in and out and carry things around feeling important and devastated and small, and then we simply leave, shifting dimensions with our carcasses left behind. Carcasses. Stuff. Anything else?  What stays, at least for a while?  If love stays, where does it go, becoming as it does, conjoined with inexpressible pain? I know of course that it fills me up from the toes. What else?  I ask because that’s what I want my life to be about while I’m here. For all my abstraction and taste for temporary things like print-making and flowers and hugs, I want to center my time around permanence. I think. 

Would collections of impermanent things become permanent over time?  Might they be embedded in the energy that is me so they remain, like navigational coordinates for future travelers?  Art decays while it is here on earth but does the creative act likewise become corrupted, or does it hover, joining with the life-bringers in a great, joyful dance we cannot see? Flowers last only days, dropping petals, browning at the edges. Everything lovely and natural and sweet like a lilac breeze (not those horrid, wide-eyed porcelain figures that bait with the subtlety of dart boards) may somehow collect itself, honey in a jar that we find on the other side. And hugs, well, those are obvious, I suppose.  Physical manifestations of affection, support, love, comfort, must somehow remain, even if they’ve leaked to somewhere we can no longer feel them from here. They carry meaning.  They carry hope. They hold every ounce of anything that ever mattered anywhere. 

I suppose those are still the things that matter to me, then. If I end this life having done nothing but loved, comforted, held, beheld, and generally spent myself on beauty, authenticity and kindness, then I will have left behind the only things that matter. I’ll do other things sometimes, God help me. I believe there is grace for that. It gets burned off as we transition from here to there. So since I have no children I’ll spend all of myself on you and me and the God who made all the good stuff, all this weird interdimensional, grounded reality and spiritual plane shit, as though he knew what he was doing when he put everything into play. Maybe each one of us is actually a note in a grand orchestral song. I think that would be fine with me. 

by bcmiller2014

New Year

And just like that, it’s over. 
All the twinkle lights and 
farmed trees in their red 
buckets of sugar-water,
windowsills with garland and
Doctor Who marathons 
opposite Jimmy Stewart on the 
old movie channel. 
I’m sleeping until noon until 
next year whether it 
brings happiness or the
drab kind of weather that
requires gin and a therapist. 
The truth is we never know 
what’s coming. All we have 
is this moment, this one 
breath for our senses to
collect all their data on
the now, regardless of
circumstance, and find 
their own reasons to 
choose love. 

by bcmiller2014

Roller Coaster

Chug up, push
down lift over roll 
forward running 
knowing one will
follow others. 

Chug down, pull
forward, pry up
backward crawling
guessing others
lead to more of less. 

Up and down and
forward backing
love and silence
linked together riding
roller-coaster-like,
wanted undesired. 

Days and evenings 
given taking work and
playful inklings lost,
the serious small 
injuries compile
to hemorrhage life, to

death we travel 
swift and slow by 
blinks and swallows 
flying, limping wishing
for a mindful heart that
filled instead of emptied. 

by bcmiller2014

Colorful Language

I dye my hair purple to
say something about
myself, using color 
as a statement, a
definition of sorts. I 
have the choice to use 
it, to pay for it and have 
a nice conversation with
the colorist, my
linguist, giving me a 
language of my own. 
It includes words like
“rebel” and “artist” and
probably “democrat”
though it has nothing 
to do with my politics. 
I don’t mind. They 
describe me, after all,
but don’t define 
me. They don’t limit
what I’m able to say. 
I can supplement with
my voice, my tongue 
twisting air bravely 
into syllables that say
I’m sensitive and shy
and kind. The language
of my hair conflicts,
actually, with my 
demeanor. It makes
me at once bold and
reticent, vivid and 
mellow, unhindered and
subdued. Color says 
something about every
person, but doesn’t 
contain the whole. 
Who I see hears 
differently than I say
or scream loud over 
what others think I
listen, communication 
scrambled and the 
power to feel confused
in the moment. 
Stop. 
Hear my color, see
my story, the me behind
all the words and 
visual aids, and I will
do for you, as we are
all given our own
languages to pluck 
from the grass and gather
like bouquets, the
hardest part being
to listen.