Everyone’s Addiction Seems the Same
It’s in the waiting
The hungry waiting, it’s like I haven’t eaten.
It’s like the long instructional walks for hours among trees and wind and random angles of
sunlight are always just a hold –
Getting ready for you or calming myself after you.
The days. The worried days of virus and open hours.
The subtlety. The magnitude.
It’s in the waiting that I feel sick.
Or is it thrilled? Or is it haunted, or maybe sad?
I write six poems for you and make a star.
I open cabinets and toss out spices like a mitzvah.
I couldn’t care less about what I need, what you need, or how humans survive.
Just waiting, sipping, pacing, not digging my nails into my own palms.
I notice everything around me, but the faces aren’t yours.
My troubled fascination. My empty ghost.
My paper.
The Meeting
That was the most awkward thing I can remember doing –
A slow burn ticking of monumental weighted clock hands.
We sat and went over and dissected, by my asking, and I never want to do it again, but I will.
Because I can no longer afford to live in the dark.
But still, awkward, all of my manic defense are retching out at me to be felt, like a turn, a fable I have lived all this many times.
I am overtaken, possessed, weak and absent but juiced with the kind of adrenaline that makes mothers turn cars.
The darkness taunts ideas of normalcy and sleep, and alcohol poisons my blood and my thoughts
I wonder if my body would turn and wetten and open for anything in its sad desperations.
Only to live, one more day and walk as many miles as it takes to clear this, to clear the sticky
thickening aggression of feelings as they surface, surface, they keep surfacing, bobbing little
menaces –
I will walk myself to death, to a needle, into the woods or maybe the sea, empty –
Hoping for emptiness, rather, but smothered.
You were witness to my buried moments, under my pretty dress, under my smile, you see the
eyes I fill are only curtains, shades, you see the caverns of catacombs of rooms dim lit.
I’m sorry I asked for the meeting.
I’m sorry I asked for your heart and your time.
I’m sorry my active little child me can’t stop climbing from hiding from climbing, waiting for the bell.
You draw me drowning myself.
I was crying just yesterday, I have no idea why.
The day will be bright again tomorrow.
I will live it.
These nights are the bully.
Settling in of Paul
Someone I know had died.
Earlier in the day as I explained the details I was surprised by my own lack of feeling.
As I noted their fears of isolation, of growing old alone, of taking one’s own life, I consoled with the distance of a surgeon.
Later as a text came in from a broken bond, one I would normally have pacified, I backfired in
response like a wakened Kali, and felt fire in me like a thousand marred women rise up to fight.
Unable to stop it, he begged against my cruelty as I poured lemon into the cuts he had given himself.
And then I drank wine as I drove through the night.
And then I became angry with every feeling that had the nerve to exist.
Then I began to write.
What came out was not beautiful.
Then I curled into myself like a fiddlehead.
Then, alive, I ate three pieces of whole fruit at two in the morning.
It took me literally 9 hours to place the sting to the cut, to pin the fire to the burn.
Mia Frisch has spent the past twenty years exploring human potential through spirituality, yoga, art, and writing. She spent 12 years as a leader at The Omega Institute for Holistic Studies in Rhinebeck, NY, as well as spending time at Tassajara Zen Center in San Francisco and Kripalu Center for Health in Lenox, MA. She explores revealing and expressing personal growth and internal processes through art and writing, preferring the confessional style of poetry. She recently wrote a book for women on navigating life changes, and spent 6 years exploring the west coast and living close to the land. Now back in the NY area, she lives in Albany and continues to express her feelings and experiences through various mediums.
