Dear Penelope, by M

i feel like there's a storm coming. some sort of rough and hard thing. perhaps it was too much time watching the sea pound the shore and sweep surfers north from a south swell yesterday. and the feeling is something that wants to trip me up and sweep me out too even though i'm on the mountain top full flung with joy... sometimes putting on sneakers, bandaging my foot, sometimes dancing, sometimes back at my friends porch guarding her with angel sentinals as the bored man looks on. i'm fragmented. maybe its the loud loud battle i see right beyond the trees and her vision of all the animals running down the mountain fleeing from something. she's seen a bear, a fox, a deer in real life wandering past in the night. the other day i saw huge butterflies, no birds. and i can't shut out the fierce clanging. and the image of my husband lost out there somewhere, in the battle beyond, where i can't see him. like in the refiners fire i've been left to go on beyond the mountains without him and trust he'll meet me and i won't be left there alone, as a mystic without a lifesong. he was laying in the field like a casualty and i stepped over him to the battle and marked him with a cross on his forehead and kept walking but then came back and sat with him a while but was forced to go. and he ran back out.

perhaps too much is happening in my head and i need an isolation tank. and everything around me too intense and vibrating. and its the hot days and the jobless wonder, right before the searching comes and the breeze cools, right when the bills are due and not being sure if the EDD is coming through. or feeling that push to go off to a far off place and already knowing the loss of change. that, something is coming. something, like i said, rough and hard.

but anyway its time to sleep. probably tomorrow it'll vanish and the anxiety will recede, but maybe it won't and then i'll remember why. or i'll be in the waters writing and painting and finding my way back again to all the concrete parts of me.