Breaking my own Glass

January 10

BREAKING MY OWN GLASS

The police of a small town caught a serial glass breaker today. The man who owned a plate glass repair shop was breaking store front windows. I break my own. I go through my life; I slash my own tires and break my own glass. I fear continuity, stability, success. I love damage control, making arts and crafts from my slivers and shards.

“Think what you could do with undamaged goods,” says my sponsor.

I don’t know how to do anything with undamaged goods, except damage them or give them to others.

“Saddest thing I’ve ever heard,” she counters.

“Stick around,” I tease.

I can make a quilt from discarded clothes, mosaics from shattered dishes, collage from junk mail. I can hold your hand and cheer you on. See the potential in every person in a crowded hall. Rescue every stray on the block.

“What have you done for you lately?” my sponsor taunts.

She is making my point. What can I do for me? Search and destroy? Live outside myself? I have to be sober to be me. I can’t go around making messes so I have something familiar to wallow in. What if I can’t do anything fresh?

“Learn to market the retreads,” she says.

Watch an old thing in a new way.

*

Hoarfrost

On balmy evenings dew forms in my life

and moistens my extremities.

This friendly act requires the maintenance of temperature.

If I become suddenly cool the landscape changes

and the once welcoming vapor

is now a show of crystalline rigidity.

Cold to the morning light I am brittle

and snap at even a tentative touch.

For want of passion I have replaced it

with definition and structure I can not absorb.

I am outlined clearly but no longer myself.

I am frozen, formally changed within and without.

Warmth is necessary, but how to start my own fire?

Learn I must and quickly, lest frostbite set in.