Cara Colleen

Break Out

It all seems so much these days.
Work, school, home, husband, children, ex-…
Feels like the world won’t leave me alone for a minute,
Though I’m sure that must be pure exaggeration.
A quiet minute where no one expects anything
Would be truly heavenly!
Better yet, a quiet hour, or a quiet half day
Would be even more heavenly—
A whole day too much to ask I am sure.

The responsibility of it all sometimes overwhelms me.
One small crisis happens here, some other fiasco there,
Events pile up, and before I realize it,
I can’t take a breath without effort,
I can’t do an action without forcing myself,
Because I feel completely frozen—
Physically, emotionally, mentally stuck in the moment.

It would be so much easier to not move,
To stare blindly at reality and let it all pass me by.
Sometimes someone asks me what’s wrong and
I don’t want to speak.
I’d rather let silence enfold me forever, but…
I care too much for those who care for me at all.
Despite the demands, I know they love me.
So, I push through the walls of oppression,
Break out of the silence, and make myself move.

The first word, the first step, is always the hardest,
But trying at all means something.
As I move through the sludge,
Effort gets easier until I can think again,
Walk again, talk again… breathe again!
So, although it seems so much, and
Like the world won’t leave me alone…
Well, not leaving me alone is a good thing in the end,
Because left to myself, I’d freeze up forever
Into a hard, cold, bit of humanity.

The Art of Words

Although my tastes have gravitated more towards the visual,
Something within me still likes the lines of type
That shape the pictures you cannot see.
Imagination is far more beautiful than definite image.
So I struggle to pen the unseen flight of fancy
As my mind modifies the world around me
Into palatable, manageable frames called words
Shaded in with letters of the alphabet.
Like a painter’s palette, I play with my vocabulary—
Word-forms, order, grammar, and structure.
I make my own logic out of irrational garble
Till I can stand back and look at the finished canvas,
Adding a comma here, an ellipsis there, or
A dash to gap the flow into something
More deliberate and less haphazard.
Word pictures are harder to render, but well-worth the effort.