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.
You are reading selections from Sober on the Way to Sane
and More Lines From My Life by Sherrie Theriault
