A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to a Chap book

I have been bouncing around a number of ideas lately in regards to my poetry.  I promised myself that over the break from school, I would choose pieces for a chap book – a collection of roughly 24 poems.  I have rolled a number of them around in my head and, over the last couple of days, have been gifted with a couple of pieces which will make great capstones for the book. 

The publishing bug has bitten me, and like all artists, the little taste of exposure has enticed me to chase more of it.  So I do. 

The funny thing that has happened on the way to this chap book is the exorcism of much of the poisonous blood I have carried about my relationship to my mother.  I knew that journaling is a great way to release and heal but I had forgotten the healing power of poetry…sounds so stupid when it comes onto my page…but that is what is happening.  My voices in my head have been dictating poems about her for months and, out of my Morning Pages have come many pieces with her as the star.  I don’t know if it is really helping but I know it shows the bruised places in me about our fucked up relationship and my fantasy life of how much I wish it weren’t so.

Such is the way of the world:  we are sold a bill of goods promising us that our homes will be safe, our parents will be the tv sitcom perfection we dreamed of as children, and as we age that relationship will never change but will become richer and more beautiful.  Perhaps, for some people that is, indeed, the reality – lucky them – but more likely, the reality is closer to mine than the fantasy. Let me share with you the pieces that have cracked me open.

Today I offer you a couple of pieces which will, inevitably make their way into the book.  They are new.  Brand new: one from yesterday and one from today.  I am quite pleased with them.  I hope you enjoy them, too.

to the locked up parts of me i promised to protect

Somewhere.

Somewhere in the back of her mind –

so far back it was in a place she could barely reach without the aid of a step-stool –

somewhere, deep in the back of her, lives a shadow in the figure of a girl;

a woman-child.

A shadow,

an outline –

like the carbon-burned shadow forms blasted,

melted into concrete in Hiroshima or Nagasaki –

an outline of something once female hovers

with memories of dolls and tea sets and Easy Bake ovens

but somewhere closer –

so much closer that the step-stool was useless –

somewhere close in her, lives a memory of all of that hair,

all of those eyelashes,

and ankle socks,

forming some kind of wordless allurement to touch,

sans invitation,

sans desire,

sans understanding of the weight of the hand on her thigh,

her head,

her breasts.

The laughter burned in her ears and scorched her brain

like the Hiroshima hand prints left on her body

and she shut her eyes tight in quiet solitude,

promising never to be female again.

R. L. Elke

Dec 29/16

newtonian laws as they apply to my mother

Law #1: an object (me) will remain at rest or in uniform motion (my peaceful life) unless acted upon by an external force (you).  Objects (me) will remain in their state of motion (my life) unless a force (you) act to change the motion (fucks me up).

My life remains at rest in an orbit of its own making,

with an energy allowing me constant motion forward, somehow,

in spite of the many attempts,

by other bodies,

to make it otherwise.

Your external force of “cookie and a punch” parenting launches me off course –

careening into foreign bodies –

looking for uniform motion once again.

It’s inevitable and always happens like a perpetual motion machine knocking me toward you and away from you over and over and over and over and…

Law #2:    F (net force) = mass x acceleration

This law has certain limitations (as do we).  It does not apply to changing mass or if the object is moving close to the speed of light or on an atomic scale – relativity and quantum mechanics apply, respectively, in those cases, but is effective for the solution of standard problems including the effects of friction (any time we are around each other too long).

As so was my adolescents around you,

when your disdain for my round, pre-womanly body forced me to quickly change or –

see Law #1 –

be cast into isolation from the adoration of your gaze.

I am not sure if it was my size or my masculine edge –

my connection to my father –

that forced you to slap me with that famous, transformative phrase:

You have such a beautiful face, Ramona.  Boys would like you so much more if you lost weight.

What you didn’t know is that weight is not mass.

What I am made of could not be altered –

should not have been able to be altered by the gravity of your words –

even though it weighed me down,

weighed on me for years.

Law #3:  All forces in the universe occur in equal but oppositely directed pairs (us).  There are no isolated forces; for every external force of equal magnitude but opposite direction which acts back on the object – for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction (our dance).

“There are no isolated forces” –

which dooms us, really, to this mess of back and forth,

to and fro,

embrace and push back;

in this waltz of abuse enrobed in good intention.

I push,

you reach out.

I step to you,

you move away.

So it has gone on since the beginning when I appeared,

unbidden –

bad timing and all –

forcing your life away from the one you had longed for:

a working girl in the city,

an escapee of the chattering hamlet which had cast you in a role you did not want

or deserve…

a theme in your life.

I forced you to take the role of wife and mother and you,

unconsciously/subconsciously,

reacted in an equal and opposite direction,

of rejection in order to survive the changing forces in your universe;

setting the stage for the rest of the movements of us:

to and fro,

embrace and push back,

stepping toward an running away –

the waltz of heartbreak we dance.

We are forces of nature,

doomed to be ruled by forces we cannot see,

to ways of being we may not want

because Newton has given us no other choices

because “there are no isolated forces” –

everything seems to force our motion onto predetermined paths.

I don’t know.

Perhaps our release lay with Einstein.

R. L. Elke

Dec 30/16

On This Solstice

On this dark night – the longest of the year – I listen to Joe Rogan’s pod cast whilst preparing food for supper and for the Christian feast in 4 days.  There are men who remind us to look to the sky and re-connect with the inhabitants therein – the heavenly bodies encircling us and our ancestors…the light reaching us is the same light reaching them hundreds of thousands of years ago.  Their light is our light.

They knew the power of the solstice and the equinox and the high drama of the fight of light and dark – the fight for the survival of all of us and all living creatures with which we share this orb of earth, air, fire, and water.  They knew what to do on these nights – to go to the top of the highest place and raise hands to the sun, praying for its return.

I had planned to do that.  It never happened.  I still may go to the park yet tonight and reach to the stars and thank them for their light, protecting us from the blackening night and all of the monsters hiding therein.  What I have done, however, is to marvel at what a difference six months make…how the Sun King anoints us with his warmth and leaves us too soon.  How I had written a poem about the summer solstice and how it felt like such a rip off for the first day of summer to come even before school was out for the year…for the days to shorten before my longest, blissful days had begun. 

There is no such sorrow on the winter solstice, strangely enough.  There is no such sorrow – even in this impenetrable darkness, there is no sorrow…there is only a drive to burrow deeply into the sacred spaces of myself and confer with the elders; to sit with the ancients and feel their wisdom whisper to my bones.  Only a pull to my tarot cards and to warm soup and black teas flavoured with orange and clove and rum.  Only a desire to dress in nothing but furs, to feel that silky touch on naked skin and sigh a prayer of thanks to the creature for its touch...and to melt the darkest of chocolate on the tongue slowly so as not to never forget the taste of it.

When my older children were small, they would be allowed one gift to open for Yule.  They were allowed one gift and promised a story at bed time of the Holly King and the Oak King who fought tonight for the sun – to make sure that the sun would rise in the morning.  What I omitted was the version of the story in which the Holly King and the Oak King were two handsome men who were fighting for the hand of the beautiful consort – the Sun Queen.  The Holly King was older and had fulfilled his duty to the Queen and now it was time for the young, virile Oak King to take over until June 21, when the Holly King would fight the Oak King and the whole cycle would start again.  Both were supple and keen to serve. Both worshiped her so she would rise every morning, pleased and satisfied; for when she is satisfied, we are all satisfied.

I think of those lovers now, the men fighting until midnight, when she arrives in the doorway to say goodbye to the Holly King, and gathers up her new lover.

Gawain wore the Holly and, before the Christianization of the Arthurian Legends, was considered to be a manifestation of the Green God but also a manifestation of the Holly King.  There are stories of his banishment of the Red Knight, I believe, from the Pentecost feast in the Great Hall, which caused the disintegration of the Knights of the Round table and sent them to the four corners of the world to find the Grail…

So many interesting stories for this time of year.  So many based in reflection and taking stock and counting blessings and aching to be near those we love most.

This piece was my gift today from the angels of poetry:

For the Sun 

Deep in this fitfulness digs discontent –

a tick infecting flesh with madness,

delirium,

or dread of days darker than these.

Not today –

on this day of darkest days,

when Night holds captive the Sun

for much longer than we dare imagine,

today we love light and entice it to stay for one more drink

because, baby it’s cold outside,

and I left my coat laying on his bed.

Today we coax Night out

and create new ways to pacify his longing for darkness.

We need light today –

darkness has reigned too often this year.

Return to dance with us, beloved.

We miss your starry eyes.

R. L. Elke

Dec. 21/16

Blessed Be you this Solstice and may Light love you always.

Part 2: What is the Way to say goodbye?

The subsequent days have been better.  A talk with Dal helped me step back from the edge – he assured me that Leonard Cohen was as anxious about his talent as I am about mine and felt his smallness in the shadow of those who inspired him.  He assured me that my grief was acceptable and my doubt was natural and held me in my tempest of tears as I raged against grief and death.  He steadied my faltering footing so that the rest of the week was exhausting but less of a burden.

This morning I was up early and wrote my daily pages and poem by candle-lit darkness and decided to take advantage of the extra time and head back to the forest with my ipod to walk with Cohen and see what he could reveal to me today.  I read a couple of articles which echoed Dal’s notions from earlier in the week and I wanted to commune with the cool winds and rain and that voice…those words…to see if there was any hint anywhere of the portal to the poetry.

To see if I could plug into what it was, this loss, for me – where he entered my life…not when…where…what part of me opened to him and his imagery, his permission for pain and loss.  

I remember it now…There was a child named Bernadette.  I heard the story long ago, she saw the Queen of Heaven once and kept the vision in her soul.  No one believed what she had seen.  No one believed what she’d heard: that there were sorrows to be healed and mercy, mercy in this world…

            I was in my mid-twenties and had recently moved to Victoria to go to school.  Sitting in the driver’s seat of my red Firenza, Jennifer Warnes shared the story of Bernadette and I saw, for the first time in twenty years, the “Queen of Heaven” and felt every word and note so deeply, I could feel my DNA change.  I realised, in that moment, for the very first time…that I was broken…deeply, profoundly broken.  I had seen an angel and was told I wasn’t special enough for that.  I had been the focus of sexual inappropriate appetites of family members and strangers and had buried all of it so deeply there hadn’t been a whisper of it until that moment, with those lyrics, in that front seat.  I froze.  Then I broke open like the levies after Katrina and melted into a thousand pains.

I met Cohen through Jennifer Warnes and the Famous Blue Raincoat album.  I have the entire thing memorised.

Joan of Arc spoke to me in the days before that moment in the front seat of my Firenza…the marriage of the martyr to the fire intrigued me.  I loved the incongruity and juxtaposition of the images and sentiments.  Cohen was cheeky and sarcastic.

…and lusty.  I found that layer in The Future and in the collection of his work that came out in ’93, Stranger Music.  I read the work I didn’t know and felt relief.  I had been writing pieces that could have fit there next to his.  The poems entered into my by osmosis, probably, and competed with my attention to Plath, who I was devouring voraciously at the time.  I was uprooted, a new-ish mother, and wanted to find a place for my writing in my mothering.  Therapy was happening on a fairly regular basis and causing me to look into balancing motherhood and art and who I was as a sexual person…a survivor but also as one who loved to feel desire and desired – as we all do.

Water

Whisper freedom in my ear.

Let the fingertips of your soul caress mine.

Softly.

Softly.

Softly.

I see you:

The way you’ve always been:

Alive

Alone

A man.

Pluck not a blood-red rose for me,

It pales next to your beauty.

These words repeated

Over

And

Over.

How many have said this to so many?

Let me drink in your timeless,

Breathless,

Regal face.

Sipping your lips.

Gulping the ageless wisdom of your eyes.

Touch me

Caress me

Move me to extremes.

You do this without lifting a finger

R. L. Elke 10&11/07/93

I am sure that if I had known Take This Longing then, I would have echoed take this longing from my tongue…let me see your beauty broken down like you would do for one you love. Your body like a search light, my poverty revealed… Who wouldn’t? 

At least I would have had the words for the regret and loss I had felt – missing one I was in love with, who was not my husband at the time. 

If you’ve ever loved beyond measure and lost beyond grief – Cohen gives you the language for both.  We learn how to gracefully process those lost great loves and to be ok with the aching desire for those in front of us.  Good bye has never been so beautiful. 

He has awakened in me the ache of inadequacy.  Every piece more beautiful than the last.  I mean, come on, The Sisters of Mercy is a revelation. 

Those older pieces came to me of late – I am new to them, they to me.  So beautiful and painful and perfect:  when you’re not feeling holy, your loneliness tells you you’ve sinned…

SERIOUSLY?  Where do you have to go to access that?  I go there all of the time but nothing seems to sound like that – ever:  if your life is a leaf that the seasons tear off and condemn, they will bind you with love that is graceful and green as a stem…. No words.

He did say, in a New Yorker interview that he wrote every day before the sun came up – I do that.  He also had this to say about the miracle of writing:  

Does artistic dedication begin to touch on religious devotion?...I start with artistic dedication.  I know that if the spirit is on you it will touch on the other human receptors.  But I dare not begin from the other side.  It’s like pronouncing the holy name – you don’t do it.  But if you are lucky, and are graced, and the audience is in a particular salutary condition, then these deeper responses will be produced.

Well.  Ok.  Good.  That is how I approach my kitchen table every morning a little after 5 am, or  

earlier…I just show up.  I just show up and write.  Or I walk the forest paths, like I did today, and absorb the woods and, sometimes the word, starving for the soul’s nourishment.

Losing Prince was different.  It hit different places for me.  Cohen was the foundation of who I understood I am as an artist…and human.  Famous Blue Raincoat healed me from the inside out, like good Art should.  It humbled me.

His work humbled me.  I remember standing in front of paintings by Botticelli, Klimt, Rossetti, Gentileschi, Monet, and others in the National Gallery and aching – physically feeling aches in my body and my heart – because I would never be able to pick up a paint brush and create like that.  Cohen, Keats, Whitman, Sassoon, Brittain, Thomas, Plath, Sorley – all make me feel like that about my writing.  All I want to do is to create something that can sit next to them on a page and hold it’s own.  My throat aches with the pain of it. It’s four in the morning, the end of December, I ‘m writing you now just to see if you’re better…Jane came by with a lock of your hair.  She said that you gave it to her that night that you planned to go clear.  Did you ever go clear?

I want my poems to feel like prayers:  The birds they sing at the break of day.  “Start again,” I heard them say.  Don’t dwell on what is passed away or what is yet to be…Forget your perfect offering.  There is a crack, a crack in everything.  That’s how the light gets in.

I tried today, I really did.  I have been trying all week to capture the atmosphere and my pain on Tuesday on that walk and I just can’t seem to hear it yet.  Maybe soon.  I’ll be silent and listen for it.

Good bye

I cannot move past the anguish of souls and the ties that bind theirs to mine.

And sometimes the best thing to do is to be silent inside and listen to the voices of grievers gone before to find a way out –

or the grace to stay silent in it for a while.

Walked through the mist in a freezing November morning

when I wanted to waltz to the muted Flamenco ¾ guitar.

Balancing beside the bird on the wire, outside the Chelsea hotel.

My famous blue raincoat discount,

not Burberry.

Absorbing, by slow decay, this –

the bareness of bare branches and leaves pounded to pablum beneath my falling feet –

not feeling holy,

loneliness reminds me I’ve sinned.

Feeling guests pass by and reach out so near me I feel the tips of their fingers.

Chasing the ¾ time through the hunger, like an arch where the troops passed through.

I nearly held it – the words this longing on my tongue –

but just can’t hold them any more than I can grab a hold of this mist and the hands of the ghosts passing through.

So I walk and scream into silence the voices in my head

to learn what to say, by fire and water,

that could ever be a decent way to say goodbye.

R.L. Elke

Nov. 27/16

I dunno.

I just dunno what else to do – so I’m gunna just keep writing.  Maybe he can reach me now that he is spirit.

I hope so.

Part One: The Walk in the Darkness

It started in the same way it always starts:  the end of the bad day at school.  It began with a bad day at school and my funeral pants.  I chose to wear the fucking funeral pants.  I knew I shouldn’t.  I wasn’t going to but I had to test it.  I wore those pants to the funeral for D and for C and for R.  All kids.  All beloved and missed.  Would that energy follow me?  Oh, it did and it turned out to be a day so bad I had to run away to the forest at dusk when I got home.

So, awash with burden and anger and frustration, suffering from PTSD in the chill and wind and rain; feeling the grief again and ashamed that after nearly five years all that shit still felt fresh – as fresh as it did five years ago – I ran away to the forest in the lingering dark.

It was beautiful for my mood.  It was dreary and rainy and chilly.  I started my loop from the top of the hill near the condos.  It was perfect poetry weather. Perfect.  I scrolled through my music, before I got out into the rain, and my eyes fell on Leonard Cohen.  I immediately tapped his name.  I hadn’t properly had some time with him since his passing and Dylan had just sent me a picture of his flower laden stoop the night before.  Perfect.  Now was the time.

I pushed play, cowled myself with my rain hood, pulled my scarf up to my nose and stepped into the rain.  The opening lines of Suzanne purred into my skull and my whole body filled with warmth.  Deep, reverberating sadness, too.  I felt the poetry of the moment in the deepening dusk and the wind and the rain – in the naked trees shattering the skyline in the deepening dark – and my aching heart.  The tears slowly started to come, one at a time, and mix with the rain droplets on my face.  By the time I got to the back field it was all but dark.

And then the three-quarter time, waterfall waltz swirled around me and, for the first time I heard: O, the sisters of mercy they are not departed or gone, they were waiting for me when I thought that I just can’t go on.  I settled into the heaviness then, surrendered to it and let it come upon me in the fullness of its weight in the ever deepening dark.  By the time I got to the back field, it was all but dark.  There was enough light for me to see the ground so I didn’t slip and fall in the squelchy spots where the path was muddiest.  I constantly had to renegotiate my footing on grass as he sang his goodbyes first to the woman with the hair upon the pillow like a sleepy golden storm and then to Marriane and it didn’t occur to me until the next morning, as I wrote my pages by candle light of the early black morning, that I had lost my footing – was losing my footing – with my neediest group at school because I believed I didn’t really have it in me to fall in love with them as I have in the past…but let’s not talk of love or chains or things we can’t untie…

The deeper I walked into the darkness of the falling sky, I realised I couldn’t care anymore. I felt that I was too afraid and too tired.  I was haunted by the notion that I had chosen to wear my funeral pants because my other pants were too tight and I didn’t feel like enduring the indignity of denim squeezing self-esteem over the waist band of my jeans.

I just knew something bad was going to happen when I put on those pants.  Maybe that thought – that energy – poisoned my day.  I thought about that, too, as I approached the graveyard parallel to the path I walk.  By now Famous Blue Raincoat played and my whole body filled with heaviness.  I felt every chill and just wanted to sit and listen to Cohen sing my hurts and frustrations and hopelessness away.  I wanted to sit on a bench and look out into the valley, with its golden yard lights on weeping farms, and dream of days in my childhood when I would look for city lights, or stars, at the darkest part of night, before I knew the Northern Lights.

The day had started so beautifully with a gorgeous pink sunrise and a vivid rainbow in the west when I was on my way to drop Dante off at school before my meeting.  I remembered none of those things trudging, wet and cold, up the hill back to the car to The Chelsea Hotel filling my head. 

Then it hit me.  Leonard Cohen is dead.  This God among poets is dead and only people like me have been left behind to carry on what he started. 

The last thought made my breath catch…a hiccup almost…of sheer panic; complete terror or maybe shame.  And just under the murmur of The Guests came the realisation that I would never be able to write anything as good as Cohen.  Ever.

I had to sit down.  I perched myself on a metal bench and looked out into the dark valley at the headlights creeping over the Mission bridge – the caterpillar of light – and kept feeling that realisation over and over and over, deeper into my body. Hallelujah started and confirmed the thought.

I just wept there on that cold bench, for the world without poetry and wondered how we would ever survive it…clenching your fist for the ones like us who are oppressed by the figures of beauty…well never mind, we are ugly but we have the music. 

I went back to the car and wept some more for the dead philosopher poet and my aching heart for the boys I could not love so I could survive in a job that daily does its level best to kill me.  And I tried to write a poem about the burden of stepping in the footprint of the giants, knowing that his shoes will never be filled because I go barefoot:

In this November dark,

by Cohen, I try to find the same paths which comfort by day.

Now in dusk, whispers away from darkness,

there is a privacy in my hood to weep for the world and my tired heart

burdened by the weight of the job to take up the torch of word and song...

To continue the reverberations of Hallelujah in the tower of song and the weight of it all buckles my knees...

blinded by the mascara in my eyes...

wishing for a pen instead of a glowing slab of plastic

to do him justice.

It's too heavy a burden and I am terrified I will never write a decent piece again - 

Nothing will ever be as transcendent as his.

Ever.

While he lived all possibilities were available

but now it's over and too heavy...too much.

There is nothing left in me now.

Love is not enough...and I cannot reach it any more...

the burden of the word is too heavy now.

I have no Suzanne or Marianne and this waltz trips me up now on my grey words.

Maybe I'll feel stronger soon but right now,

in this dark November rain, it is all too heavy to bear.

R. L. Elke

Nov. 22/16

I got home and tried to connect with my husband and son over dinner but just couldn’t do that.  I went to bed to write…then a dear old friend texted me to let me know that a friend of ours from our school days had passed and we missed the funeral.  He had suffered from depression for a long time but was doing well, according to the herald of the news. She had been in contact with him recently – more recent than my correspondence with him over a year ago.

I remembered his impish grin and his wavy brown hair and how was always saying pervy shit – but it was funny…one by one the guests arrive, the guests are coming through.  The open-hearted many, the broken-hearted few…And I realised that we were the losers – the herald, her brother, the deceased, and me – always on the outside looking in at the “cool kids.”  I didn’t know that then.  They were just my friends – the first people to embrace me on my arrival to my millionth school.  I spent the most time with those kids – more time than anywhere in my life to that point.  We were the losers and one of us felt that burden into adulthood…we all felt that burden but one of us couldn’t reconcile it and free it…it became so heavy for him that the burden was too heavy for him to bear. 

I made several attempts to write poems to capture that walk and the weight of the realisation of my inadequacy to become a mentor of the next generation of poets, and it just became too much.  I turned off my light, after closing my book and putting the pen in its spine.  I turned off my light and wept to The Guests and The Song of Burnadette – which kills me everytime – and I Came So Far For Beauty.   

I wept for poetry, and my career, and for Dusty – sweet, strange Dusty – who felt so lonely and other that he needed to leave.

One by one, the guests arrive,

The guests are coming through,

The open-hearted many

The broken-hearted few…

And those who dance, begin to dance

Those who weep begin

And “welcome, welcome” cries a voice

“Let all my guests come in.”

Never.  My bare feet are too tiny to fill these shoes.  Nov. 23/16

Morning reflections on last night's results

By now so much has been said about the outcome of the election that my little voice is a whisper in the hurricane.  It’s drowned out by the tsunami wave of thoughts and opinions of the rest of the world.

But that doesn’t stop the voices in my head.  It didn’t stop me from rising early to check my phone, bleary-eyed, to check the outcome…hoping against hope that love would save us.  That there really was room for reason in the age of social media and somewhere educated people would be enough to calm all of this shit down. 

Nope.  That was way too much to ask for.

Then the memes and the tweets and the comments began to roll in and I was leaning over the precipice of despair and it all hit me at once…right about the time I read this facebook reposted tweet:  “What I learned on Election Night:  Being a racist, bigoted, prejudice, lying sexual predator is still more acceptable that being a woman.”…

Yep.  That one hurt.  A lot.

What hurt even more is that there are actually people that I thought I had a pretty solid friendship with, a solid respect for who over looked all of that savage behaviour and passed off the revelations of Trump’s sexually predatory nature as “sticks and stones.”

Two points, I feel need to be clarified:

1  1)      The fucking sisterhood is bullshit.  I knew that.  I’ve always known that.  From the time I was in Junior High and the girls wrote that I was a cock sucking slut on the bathroom walls (even though I didn't even know what all of that meant), I knew the sisterhood was bullshit.  HOWEVER, never, for one second did I think that the sisterhood would side with the rapist.  I guess Skinner was right – conditioning works wonders. 

The fucking sisterhood is bullshit because white women, in certain states,  voted for colour rather than making a statement about every person who violated us.  White women, in certain states,  voted for colour rather than for the LGBT, Non-binary people who stood with us for decades to help us out and we threw them under the bus like so many pairs of jizz-stained rape panties.  The connection:  Pence and Trump plan to repeal any forward steps for rights in the LGBT, non-binary communities.

Sorry, my dear LGBT, Non-binary friends of colour or otherwise, that would, certainly not have been me.

And maybe, as my husband suggested, it was about money and not colour - so the vote was for the guy with the bucks.  Oh, that's better.  :/

2  2)      It hit me this morning at my kitchen table, while I wrote my daily pages, that what this new President elect says to anyone who has lived through sexual violation – male or female – that our experiences were just normalised.  What happened to us was ok.  It says to us that there really is no justice for sexual molestations…none. 

I guess we can all be a little relieved that at least now it is out in the open and we can all stop pretending like we ever could get justice for what has happened to us.

It’s just a little difficult to face that, you know – to face the feelings that have been there all along:  the rape was ok because I had it coming somehow…the sexual abuse was acceptable because that’s just the way the world works…that anyone who wanted any part of me had unfettered access because there is no one to say otherwise…and now it really feels like that kind of behaviour has been ok’ed.

A little dramatic?  Maybe. 

So, I wrote this today, after sobbing at my kitchen table, this morning.  Gives you a glimpse into the soul of a shattered woman.  And I really do hope love will make us whole.  I really do.

the day after

Remember where you were at the end of the world?

Remember where you were when the ooze and filth rolled in

and covered the sky in screams and shrieks and moans of lamentation?

Remember the edge of the pit of despair where you hung your toes

just to see how far forward you could lean over them before your heavy heart pulled you in?

Remember the flash backs?

The fireworks of gut churning memories exploding behind your eyes,

surfacing into every muscle

and sliding across your skin until your knees buckled beneath you

and you wretched into your hands:

            those insidious touches

            and words

            those leers

            and cat calls

            those gropings

            and probings

            and pinning down

            and taking

            and taking

            and taking

            what was never theirs to have.

Remember where you were when it came to the surface –

the festering, foetid, flesh in the underbelly that now encased,

enrobed the world –

my world –

no less rotten and putrid

but now, somehow a fashion statement?

I remember.

I will always remember because I see all of the faces –

all of the faces of those who made my body dirtied with their finger prints

and DNA

and I wonder how I am going to face my work day with red, puffy eyes.

I will always remember because the reality slowly collapses around me –

in painful, beautiful waves –

that all of that uninvited invasion of my psyche,

and my body,

has just been made ok.

This morning,

and every morning,

my rapists

and predators

will wake up cleansed of their guilt.

Their violence has become ok

and

my violated body means nothing.

I remember the day I wept for freedom

and decency

and justice

at my candle-lit, early morning kitchen table,

praying that love would make us whole once more. 

R.L. Elke November 9/16

Open letter to the teachers of Abby Secondary, with love.

My dear colleagues.

My friends.

I thought of you every day this week after Tuesday.  I heard about the aftermath on the CBC and it triggered, for me, a flash back.  It hit me pretty hard, actually, because I had been sick at home Tuesday and Wednesday.  I missed the news on Wednesday but ran head on into it on the way to school on Thursday.

I thought of you.  I thought of you and remembered 2012 and the motley crew of kids I worked with in a trades program.  You know…the ones who have trouble fitting in to a traditional system.  The ones who need a little more patience and love.  I saw their faces and I thought of you. 

I thought of a Sunday in February of 2012 when my daughter’s frantic texts forced me to call my VP.  I thought of you and remembered his first words:  “You need to sit down for this.”  I learned to hate that phrase…more.  I remembered I had been cleaning my electric grill before my daughter’s texts.  I remembered that I can’t clean that grill today without my stomach knotting up.

“You need to sit down.  Blah blah blah blah car accident blah blah blah blah boys from the trades in the van and three girls from our school in the car.  Blah blah blah blah D.S is dead and so is C.W…”

From that point I heard nothing.  I think he said he was sorry.  I think he told me to take care.  I know I asked about the other boys in the van.  I think he said he didn’t have that information.  I remember the softness of the chair seat under me and how I felt as though I would sink through it.  Most of all I remember the screaming.  Someone was screaming that D.S. was dead.  Someone was screaming “NO!”  When I came back to myself, I realised it was my voice.

The rest of the week was a nightmare.

The next day, after the accident, I wanted to be with the rest of the boys.  I wanted to be with my teacher friends who knew him.  I did not want to be at home.  I did not want to be at home but I had to go to school to see them.  I had to go into the portable – the last place I saw him alive – and I didn’t know if I could do that. 

I didn’t know if I could do that.  But I did and walking up those three steps to the portable door was the most physically exhausting thing I have ever done.  My feet were made of concrete.

I thought of you then, and how you would be trying to muster up the emotional/mental/physical/spiritual strength to take the long walk back into your building.  How you would be thinking that you needed to be strong for the kids and the parents and your friends even though all you wanted to do was fall face down on your bed and scream into it until your voice gave out. 

I actually thought I would be better after the funerals.  I thought that the “closure” would bring some relief.  It did…sort of.

What I really could have used at the time was someone to sit me down with a cup of tea or coffee and tell me that the worst of it was the first day of “regular” classes when we were supposed to go back to “business as usual.” 

What I really could have used was someone to sit me down with a cup of coffee or tea and tell me how to deal with the empty chair.  That was the crusher for me.  The empty chair.

That fucking empty chair reminded me every day that he was dead.  It reminded me every day that his impish smile was gone to the world.  It reminded me that I was expected to “stay strong for the kids” and to “stay professional.”  How?  No one told me how to deal with the knot in my gut or the lump in my throat when faced with that empty chair.

The empty chair was not, it turns out, the worst…remember BCESIS?  Remember how you were asked to delete students off of your class lists when they left your class?  I could not delete him.  It felt like erasing him out of my life forever and I couldn’t.  And I stumbled on that reminder the week after I came back to school after some time off – I logged in to enter marks and ESIS asked me to delete him.  I stopped breathing and thought I was going to be sick.

I kept him on my list all year.  I let the computer delete him because I wasn’t ready…still not ready.

Two funerals and six weeks later, in April 2012, another car accident and another death.  A graduate dear to us, a dear friend of my daughter’s died.

We were all so practiced that when a colleague passed in May we were starting to look over our shoulders and wonder who would be next.  We adopted gallows humour – like soldiers or executioners – to survive. 

I didn’t start seeing colour until the summer of 2014 – or was it 2015?

Why am I telling you this?  Why am I writing this for you?

I need you to know that the next little while is going to be crazy…ups and downs…feelings of closeness and alienation like you may have never experienced.  You will learn who your real friends are and you will learn your breaking point.  You will learn to ask for help or to be crushed under the weight of your grief because you want to “be strong for the kids, parents, and colleagues.”

Don’t.

Ask for a hug, a cup of tea, a chocolate bar, a beer.  Ask for a song, a laugh, a rant session.  Ask for silence.  Ask for someone to shut up and listen.  Ask for time off.  Ask to walk – alone or with a sympathetic person.  Ask for bubble bath or sauna or massage.  Ask a psychic, a priest, a shaman why this happened so you can find a place to put it inside you that won’t infect you with anger and terror and hopelessness.

There will be moments you don’t expect, that you hadn’t even thought would come up – if you have never lost a student before.  There will be times like this:

You will be teaching a lesson or going over an assignment with the class, that class, and a moment will come up when you will say, out loud or to yourself:  “s/he would have said ___ there at that point.”  That moment sucker punched me.  D.S. was funny…a smart ass…and we were going over a worksheet as a class.  I made a comment about one of the answers and said “D would have said ___”  I didn’t realise I had made the comment out loud.  The boys all looked at me.  I had to live out the rest of the moment – I had to be real and honest.  I just said that I hadn’t expected that to happen and I needed a moment.  They gave me the moment.  Some hugged me after class and thanked me.

Your way will be different.  Your way will be different but you need to know that there will be moments like this.  You will expect to see her or hear her voice and it won’t be there and you will be forced to decide how to ride it out.

Same goes for the empty chair.  I don’t know how I would have handled the situation any differently than how I did.  Maybe I would have talked to the boys and told them that the chair was making me feel sad and ask them how they were dealing with it.  Some boys never returned to school at all for the rest of the year.  The empty chair was too heavy a burden for them.  That is how they had to deal with their pain.

I think of you and wonder how you are going to deal with the terror of the return – so violent was your experience.  So random and strange and horrifying.  How are you going to deal with the fact that the horror is captured for ever on a loop?  I am so sorry that is out there.  I think of you and wonder of your panic attacks and PTSD and remember that there are places I still cannot go, in the community near my school, without feeling my breathing become constricted.

For the first little while I didn’t even think about how to deal with that kind of stuff.  I just wanted to start to feel again because I felt nothing for a long time.  Eventually, though, the shell would crack and some light started to come in.  And as the years passed, I stumbled across some really good insights into grief.

I think of you now and I know this won’t mean anything to you right at this moment but eventually, perhaps, this analogy may be helpful to you: grief is like an ocean wave – some days, in these early days – it will feel like a tsunami and you may feel like it will take you away…and kill you if let it.  Some days it will feel like a surf wave – strong and tall but maybe you have the means to ride it out…or fall in…either way is ok.  Some days it will feel like you could fall in or brace yourself – either way the wave only comes up to your knees.  Eventually the waves will be small and slide over your feet.  You acknowledge the wave and honour your place in it but you let it slide over you.  These waves will never be the same nor will you react to them the same as they hit you.  One day, they will wash over and away.  But maybe not today…and that is ok.

Dear colleague, friend, I will tell you what a friend said to me in those early days of tsunami waves of grief:  “your pain is welcome here.”  Those words became a life jacket for me.  So I will say to you:  your pain is welcome here and, as a friend of my daughters told her, “it won’t get better, it just gets different.”

Enough platitudes.

I am truly sorry for your pain and for the days ahead when you don’t know how you will make it.  But you will.

We do.

We have.

I am sorry for the pain and the days of doubt but know that there are people out here who have experienced the confusion and disorientation of how to feel as a teacher when a beloved student dies…how to deal with that empty chair…that missing voice.

Know that your pain is welcome here and when you are ready we could just sit and drink coffee  or tea or something stronger and just share a knowing of what this is like…and if we want to talk, we can.  Or not.

Message me via facebook: Ramona L. Elke

Don’t do this alone.