#7. I Haven't Done This in Awhile...

This is what I felt when I read Slaughterhouse Five, in poetry form. I haven't written poems in a long, long while, and it's hard to be lyircally passionate about book-reading aha, but this is it. S-5 made me visit my memories as I was reading, especially the ones I hated and the ones I wish I could redo. I'm so intrgued by Vonnegut's mentality about time that that has become the theme of my blog. Vonnegut's words of wisdom made me want to come to peace with all my regrets. And I'm not just saying that. This is me trying to come unstuck in time. I hope it makes no sense.

Epigram or epitaph,
I could not understand those four lines
What is black ink on manilla paper
When it is both read but unread
At once.

I fell through the pages
Had to pace myself the second time around
I rushed past floating trees and pebble trails
It was then the lines unblurred into words.

Bygone days became mental scenery
As I sat there on the staircase beneath a chandelier
Reading these damn paragraphs-
Please
Stop the tidal waves now.

But my mind ran the 5K into my past
And suddenly I am time-warping in my head
This is my moment of weakness
I'm not leaning against a tree, falling asleep,
I'm sifting through mental photographs,
A disarrayed collection that I have forced into order...

That March day when you couldn't figure out a classic riddle
A summer when you left for the place of your childhood
There you jumped off a train bridge into water
And broke through the surface on an August day
I can feel the warm rain that drenched my jeans that October 9th
You filled out the letters to a hangman
Cut to the Sunday afternoon in January that I fell up the stairs
And a late April night that you were at my door
I begged my brother to tell you I wasn't home
But you walked through the front door
Knew all the steps up to my room
The floor dropped on the Canada Day that you closed the glass door
And I was walking barefoot on hot pavement.
The seasons were rolling around again.

A best friend lost,
And a lot of growing up to do,
But it was like a chain reaction that I couldn't follow.
Billy seemed lost all along
Somehow I found peace in his insanity
But I cannot in mine.

I've lived through the dead ends and open holes countless times
Scrawled out every possible way to describe all that happened
Yet my paper heart is still as blank as a cloudless sky.

Time can make you ugly,
But
What is time,
death,
and life
When I cannot feel anything at all?

Could I live the way Billy lives
Without regret,
resistance of fate
and
free will?
But you know I'm fallible
Chagrin has been all I could feel for the last few seasons
I've been treading in quicksand
Painted in colors so wrong that I could black out heaven's field.

And
This book
So broken and raw
Distorted yet enlightening
I loved it.

I found a way to come unstuck in time.