Nightmares

Secondary trauma is daily risk. Listening to the trauma narratives is interesting but takes its toll.  The secondary trauma layers on top my own primary and complicated issues of trauma that I have collected.  Here are some images and poetry I have made that deal with some of my own primary and secondary issues.

 

 

Her

some people just pass on
it doesn't matter
in what form they now appear--Marie Monroe

 

Waiting Next to Heaven

Marie Monroe

 

satan said he could have it all
but he was willing to wait on me 

he said he’s still interested with his lack of words. 

what a bunch of tangles i thought
worse than the knot at the base of my skull 

i tore too much hair trying to free it and so opted for braids 

in the room comes an ether i’ve not known. 

it flies in here with the abrupt shake of a dirty rug. 

where is the resolute demeanor
or the complication of candor? 

i am waiting on the last bus. 

i am hoping it is empty.

car doors
marie monroe

there are intimacies that can’t be spoken:
touches.
images tacked over a desk.
a stray monopoly piece, a red hotel.
hand holds from a vehicle like a drive-in fast food love.
a tiny teenage valentine: molded plastic caught in a forgotten web of my life’s string.
they come at you through the sacred heart or the solar plexus…wherever you need them.
each satisfies like the last one, but it is a hungry feast.
where hope comes from is far away.
where hope comes from is here.
some hope comes with vision, some with viscera, some with bounce.
the absolute best is not from courage.
courage lives in terror.
courage is only possibility.
this is the zone.
most brave soldiers are not warriors who walk this earth.
there is a walk that shows it.
muscle, bone, levitation.
this is the zone.
this is the warrior.
chat boxes spring up.
human languages form intelligibly as they speak.
they’ve never been spoken before.
typing is a wondrous affair.
for example, there is always fowl.
for example, circumambulation is love spinning out its lines of power,
the grids of this earth tightening.
we are safe from collapse.
we are calibrated.
we have points and between them…
there are geese.
always, for me, there are geese
flanking the wounded, waiting, waiting.
escorts.
smoke cigars in imagination.
hell, light one.
car doors will save you.
regressive speech and its sentiment will sustain.
some will fly again.
all of them.
all of them are precious.
these are the tender things.
how can you speak them?
you just dare.
 

 

Grief has been a lifelong struggle which began with a grief experience for someone who had not died and in fact, was present but not.  My earliest memory of this type of loss and grief is shortly after gaining consciousness in my father's arms.  It is my first memory and the moment at which I woke up to conscious awareness this life.  I looked around and identified myself--this is me--and my father--that is daddy.  He was carrying me down the staircase of the hotel he and my mother owned.  It was winter.  There was a Santa figurine on the desk in the hotel lobby.  I reached for it and the man sitting behind the desk handed it to me as a gift.

 

sexual violence

possession

psychosis

assault