bread and ashes

Just "a few poems" yet again. These are about my struggle between feeling like not enough or too much. Sometimes even both at once. I watch as I walk around in desperation, holding myself out to people in an attempt to give or take love, only to scare them away or to drown them because I am, yet again, too much. Other times I fear that people take willingly what I'm hesitant to give, only to discover in disillusionment that I am, as always, not enough.
I 'know' that it's okay to be either/or. My humanity makes me such. But sometimes to know something and to live it out in freedom are two very different things. Like the difference between a medical class lecture and an operating table.
So I'm learning about my bread and my ashes. They are the metaphors of my insecurity. And also symbols of sustenance and grief, abundance and deprivation. I'm learning how they come from each other, and that I need not fear either, despite their differences.
Bread and ashes. I guess I'm learning to hand out the one in compassion and the other in vulnerability.


bread becoming ashes

i made you an airplane
and taught you to make
the whirring sound
of a propellor
the same way your lips would move
to blow bubbles in bath water

the two of you travelled the
seven seas of the tiled floor
the plane used your skinny arms
for stilts
and slowly absorbed
the form of your fingers
abandoning lumpy wings
for a clenched palm print
a tiny hand fossil

with horror i imagined each
flying machine i'd given away
like a birthday party
balloon man
turning to brilliant mush
the bread becoming ashes
in your choking mouths



ashes becoming bread

a few poems ago
i watched a plane
plummet and fall
and i tumbled over
it had landed like an axe
and chopped clean through

we both burned brightly
our crash a mutual cry for help
till we were nothing
more than a heap of ash
and metal fittings

scooped up and kneaded
like clay full of air
like the back of the dying

set out out to rise
like heat from a wick
like the equatorial sun

baked brown and encrusted
like summer skin
like the thirsty earth

a fresh loaf of ashes
broken for the masses
quick while it's still scented
warm

and there were twelve
baskets left over