PTSD & Candlelight
By: Shawn Igers

Hot Ground Thoughts

Late night;
incense and an organic coffee.
The winter shawl is soon to come and
The earth blanket is ready to fall.
Winter and its notebook.
For years it was black tea and hand rolled cigarettes,
scratchy wool blankets and homemade cardboard book shelves,
pictures of art work glued to concrete walls with toothpaste.
I do not bury my soul away from biting winds.
I polish the hard corners smooth,
I scour my body with sand and shine pink
in winter.
I weep for leathery Floridians.
 

I Don’t Have Any Romantic Poems

Two plus two always comes up
With the word “four”.
Doors are meant to be
Opened and then closed.
These things are fixed; what we call reality.
So, I don’t have
the ability
to speak sonnets or verbal ballad salads.
I cook dinners
and wash dishes.
I hide from clocks
because of the mandate of their schedules.
I know not delusion.
My apologies to the ring makers,
the caterers with their ham or chicken dinners.
My apologies to would be
grandparents, aunts and uncles.
I’m sorry but you can plainly see,
this is me.
 

The Shy Lotus

I sit here, dishing up midnight eggrolls, snow falling
In the background.
I envy my cat for his fur.
I’m a bit retreated. I use my eyes
but most people ignore that part of communication.
I come home and spend hours in a corner; sutra
upon sutra until I wash myself
of everything ingested or absorbed.
Behind the locks and doors I feed my contented panda;
a fat and happy being munching on bamboo.
But among all the teeth of people I become
slender and brittle;
the timid lotus.
In privacy I dance but still
walk about softly.
Unashamed, I drink freely,
from whatever source avails.
 

Liquid Musings

I am the weary traveler come home,
the constant traveler at rest.
My feet and soul are tired and sore.
I don’t hear distant bagpipes calling me
anymore.
Those journeys anyway are done but
I wake to new ones.
I laugh and talk to my plants these days,
watch odd movies with subtitles and borrow
their lines to take to the grocery store.
I bob my head because there’s music in there,
stuff that vibrates and has to come out somewhere.
I sit on the back stoop and hear cars
And wish I didn’t.
I see buildings squatting heavily
on everything and wish they wouldn’t.
It’s not easy, in a shiny realm,
but I strive with flaw towards the zero-
self-pursuit of the inward direction never ending.
 

The Season

People huddle, thinking warmth in numbers.
People huddle, thinking the end of the world is near.
We ring bells, string up lights and call loudly to one another in the streets.
We curse the snow and turn up our collars.
We hate our wives, our very lives.
We dream of Arizona or Florida; death by shuffleboard.
But look around you;
look at the snow balanced carefully on trees,
look at the tracks left by our feet. Captured moments,
proof of existence.
We mark the year with holiday and that’s fine.
Reflection is a great, great thing.
Let’s see, she graduated from college and I graduated from prison.
She got married and I got a cat. 
But what did we give? And that’s where we get stuck sometimes.
I ask people and observe their hands disappear and their eyes find the ground.
I hope we can answer that question when it’s brought about.
The year and the people who have populated it have given me yang
even though we’re not that different.
I’ve been given another layer.
We shouldn’t say thank you or be thankful
because of the season. We should smile and be thankful because
it’s Tuesday or because it’s raining outside.
But we don’t.
We watch our TV’s and drive our cars. We rush and hurry
to get to the end of the day instead of the beginning.
We brush away both tears and happiness to get to
the fortune of our cookie.
We’re imperfect. Some of us forget to bathe and others
so compulsive we forget to do other things.
But someone, in wisdom,
created holidays where we’re supposed to be reminded.
Giving is the detail to remember.
It’s what keeps the cold at bay,
So Happy Tuesday.