Dear Genie

Beware Your Eyes — the Root of the Pit

A free-verse poem I forgot I wrote

The plugs where your eyes should clog your sight are Like a pair of rose-colored glasses, subtracted And subtracted

Cutting down to the roots like senseless, extrasensory Redwood trees A vision unshaded By the fresh lime leaves Of opportunity, or of life, or of greed.

Sheer, or unladen, Without the part of character You memorized to squeeze Inside The black-and-white television screen.

Holes as clear as the devil’s legendary pit With no seeming end Where goats are lowered, Hogtied with ropes Until darkness eats the crying bleating And pulled to safety are only the burial rights Of beige horns and bones.

~ A poem by Chloe Paulina Hawes

I found the above poem under our walled T.V. (only now do I realize the irony), written on a paper of pastel yellow, and stuck in the cheap cloth drawer where, for over two years, I’ve carefully placed a variety of papers — newspapers, portions of card-stock pads, and a multitude of seemingly random words I’ve scribbled down in whichever notebook or on whatever stray paper, whole or scrapped, is within closest reach of my readied right hand. Most peculiar was that, at first, I could just barely recall writing the piece, though it was unarguably mine. Maybe my perception has changed. I've often written on those sheets of egg-yolk craft paper; and it’s not so much I don’t wholly remember creating this poem, but I had forgotten its heaviness.

You see, much of my poetry leans into the “creepy” side (likely, in part, a reflection of my nightly dreams — God: truly, help me), but I always hold the most favored of those poems close to heart. It isn’t rare that I come across writings I had forgotten I ever penned, but it is out of the ordinary that I find a creation I feel somewhat proud of now but had apparently abandoned. As if it were one of my dozens of half-finished poems. No, I don’t favor this one as much as the one about spiders, but I take my writing seriously and I wouldn’t submit Beware Your Eyes — the Root of the Pit if I didn’t believe — and hope — the poem is worthy and has potential to speak to others.

Honestly, I might have written this poem after I had purposely skewed my own day-to-day perception (if you catch my drift). I used to be afraid I wouldn’t write well if I didn’t drink. But I don’t drink like that anymore — in the sense that I stopped drinking completely for a year and a half after, quite literally, nearly destroying myself, and in the years since, my partner and I might, generally, have a couple beers once a month at most. But the epic tale of my alcohol use (bet you’ve never heard that thrilling premise before) is a story for another time. And I have written in these past years — more than I’d have once thought possible. So it doesn’t really matter when, under what circumstances, or even why I wrote Beware Your Eyes — the Root of the Pit. I feel it is meaning more powerfully now than I did when I must have first reviewed it. And now I’ll remember it.

~ A note by Chloe Paulina Hawes