PROSE POETRY

The Vines of Shame

A prose poem with commentary

I feel frazzled. unclean. unkept. irresponsible. a doddler. rickety. soft & at the same time too sharp. This morning, while I woke, sprouts crept out of the 7th vertebra under my neck — that one that hasn’t been quite right since the fall.

Later, I was a trumpet, howling. To be a trumpet, you must be shameless, and so for that moment, I must have been unashamed. But, it seems that shame grows like ivy out of the broken bits. Overwhelming, if left forgotten. And I neglected my sight. “I am unkept,” shame says. “Not on my skin, but in my person, irreparably.” I, in my unkemptness, forgot to trim shame’s vines.

The shadow of shame’s leaves makes a dark area to gestate its own seed. This same shadow makes it hard to see my imaginary instruments.

There are a lot of ideas for how to manage shame. Some of them are quite good. I love Brené Brown’s Ted Talk on shame and vulnerability.

But, in the poem above, I didn’t want to offer any solutions or end on a “good note” to counteract the unpleasantness of the topic. Sometimes, shame can be felt about the very idea of shame itself. Sometimes, sitting with shame without any attempt to resolve it, is the only thing that helps.