photocollage

A Wintered Heart (Narrative Poem)

/ michaelkilman / Leave a comment

A Narrative poem titled A Wintered Heart. The artwork I created goes by the same title.

A Wintered Heart

A heart of winter, a wintered heart,

She lay quiet, the letter torn apart.

Her tears streamed, like rivers to the sea

And she tried to make bargains, and made endless pleas

An age had past, and cold crept in

No smiles, no warmth, and no new life could begin

The fresh dark tears of the next mornings song

Rose up her cheeks and sapped her strength so that she could not go on.

There she lay, no warmth and no light

A mistress of time, without the slightest delight,

Waited, she waited, with her breath deeply bated

But once the cold crept in, her permafrost was fated

An act so unkind had birthed her present dread

And soon, she had sores from her long days in bed

That act of greed, and a lust for glorious stone

Had left her heart broken, now widowed and alone

She sat there all winter, in endless defeat

She lay so still, mice nested at her feet.

And as the spring time came, the sun drew in

And pressed on her face, lighting her skin.

It planted a seed below her dread,

And as the sun shone that morning, she swung out of bed

Her pain, had nested rot in her heart

And she could not bear the thought of no more love

AND no more art

And so that day, she made her demands

At the canvas she threw red paint and smoked contraband

But from her mess, came a new kind of love

A love of life, hard won, from travels above

Her wintered heart still, held great sway,

But she got a little better with each passing day

And new mediums of art caught her attention,

And she found small victories with her creative affections

So she took one step, and then one more

And one day soon she found herself outside her front door

And found a new canvas to shed her grief,

Though when she spray painted her mural, the cops chased her, called her a liar and thief

Though she had not finished and ran and hide

She planted a new seed on the cities west side,

New murals sprung up in tangent with her own,

And she started a club, and though at first people groaned

About the “grafetti” and the murals, it became a place for many to call home.

And though many of the wealthy had made their gripes

Soon the color that flooded the city brought new life

Community gatherings of collaborative art,

Helped her to get a kind of political start

She found that art brought so much relief

To help people shed the weight of their tragedy and grief

She started centers all over her city

And named them Wintered Heart, to make light of her season long self-pity

For she knew that seeing the signs swinging above

She would always remember her long lost love

And She would honor him with every stroke of a brush

Or spray can, or clay, or charcoal or the burning of sagebrush

Her wintered heart had planted a seed of hope

In place where so many felt at the end of their rope

And they loved her, and taught her a new kind of joy

That’s found in friends hearts, without any romantic ploys

Winteredheart… they chanted her name,

With love and respect and begged her to enter the political game,

Soon after elected mayor she made the city her new project,

Used art, music, theater, and poetry to help them remember self-knowledge and respect

Through her acts, she brought great change,

For the city filled with color and it helped her to rearrange,

The divides and the differences that people perceive

And she taught them that it was, in each other they should believe.

Still her wintered heart held great sway,

For she barely forgot about her lost love for more than a day

Her heart still long for his eyes and his lips

Or to run her hand through his hair with her fingertips

But she smiled, and felt, the joy of all she’d done  

Many victories, in her community, she had won

And her heart was frozen but happy at the same time.

For even a Wintered Heart, can find new rhythm and new rhyme.

Ache in the Bones.

/ michaelkilman / Leave a comment

It’s been quite a while since I did any poetry or artwork, so, here’s some new stuff. I call this one Ache in the Bones


Ache in the Bones

Aching Bones

My bones ache,

And it’s something I can barely take.   

But I look at myself and try to break from the heartaches and earthquakes of those woes and worries that I just can’t seem to shake.  

Do I enjoy them?

Do I employ my messes to solve my problems and downplay the stresses?  

Or do I conjure up more problems and conundrums, unsolvable riddles and endless questions

Do I ignore the suggestions?

See?

I see.

I see what I do,

I know what I’ve been through and am starting to understand the things that I do

To increase my own suffering and the karma that I accrue

Programmed

It’s the underlying program at work,

It’s the ways that I was a jerk,

Or the way that I lurked around my own blindspots to ignore to rot

Most of my life I followed the toxic attitudes I was taught,

Never letting myself see the light,

Instead, I fight

I fight for the right to bury my head in the sand, rather than expand

My mind, or maybe find the things that I hide behind

You just gotta move forward?

What’s forward is back,

How can you choose to move forward when you’re stuck on the wrong track?

You gotta attack those toxic flashbacks if you wanna bounce back from the blackest night

If you ever want to be alright

What happened to me wasn’t my fault

But that doesn’t mean I have to keep pouring salt, on the wounds from the assault

If I just live in default mode and lock it in a vault, how can I ever erode the pain or decode this heavy load?

Healing’s a lot of guesswork,

Like I’m not even supposed to be here, I’m just an innocent clerk

But That’s my party pity, my last attempt being witty

Before I deal with the pain…

But trauma? Trauma is like an oncoming train, and you can’t refrain from standing on the tracks that live deep inside your brain

But it’s just a game, just some lame excuse to frame my history in an event to pretend like some of it was a mystery

Things happen to us.

But we happen to others too.

Recovery from trauma might make you feel pretty blue, maybe you can barely stand the things you went through or the debts you accrued

But that doesn’t mean I can take it out on others,

Others are my sisters and brothers

On the path

And can you do the math? If we keep walking this path, we’ll face the wrath

Of our actions, of our overreactions and we will find ourselves making factions, rather than taking the course that leads to the best actions for all beings

I’m far from perfect, but I’m practicing seeing,

Practicing just being,

To be a better human being.