What Happens When You Mix Unmet Needs, the Captain of a Ship, Clanking Body Armor, and Floppy Air Guys Together?
a poetry collection based on KTHT prompts
Monday: Bringing the unresolved, unmet & disowned back to the light of my awareness
Unresolved I set those paper boats lit with candles, meant to symbolize hope and wishes to be granted, but for me a visualization of letting go of resentment held on to me, circling some drain my thought process waiting for some resolution until I realized it was not me to push forward consequences for their actions given their position of power, but rather my hope in the meanwhile that someone else will step up, or that in absence of resolution, I will grow to be someone worthy as an equal to dismantle the toxins injected.
Unmet were needs, so many needs, I was told, as if needy, sensitive, were also touchy, negative words, when the reality is that those needs were simply unmet while yours were and you didn’t even realize it because sometimes you don’t recognize what you’re missing; to reclaim that anothers’ label of me as being needy is a misworded way of setting a boundary, of them noting that they do not think (or for some reason cannot) meet needs I have requested support in, that there are ways I can recruit my internal skills to meet my own needs, and in time, in luck, in community, I may someday find someone who may be a shoulder to lean on in this journey.
Disowned is my relation to God, seems blasphemous but it is true, how do you expect a child, abused, to believe the words of adults, telling her that God loves all, and that there’s a journey charted out for everyone, yet left forgotten when she asked for help. I still disown this notion of a God, someone meant to love, but who has abandoned many, who disowned me far before I had chosen to leave this belief; I choose instead to believe that humanity engenders spirituality that if God is to be feared, it is because humanity and its flaws are to be feared; that if God is to be loved, it is because humanity has a redemption arc worthy of love.
Author’s note: A series of quite … sensitive topics! The most sensitive is probably my relation to religion, particularly how I reject a lot of it. I reject how religion had been used to perpetuate the abuse that I encountered, how religion had been used to highlight “values” that were misplaced to push me to forgive in a way that continued if not further worsened the abuse, etc. etc. and there’s certainly still a lot of resentment sitting in my heart for that. Because religion or not, I believe that children should have been protected, and that value should stand top priority against anything else. And the religion I encountered was anything but that. So please spare me the lecture of how it should have been, or how I should have experienced it, because it’s invalidating to the millionth degree to hear yet again that things “that should have been” or religion as it “should have been practiced” did not actually happen to me, as if something unique to me meant I didn’t deserve all the good parts that “should have been” a component of the experience.
Tuesday: I am the captain, ship and navigator of it all
To be a captain, ship and navigator of it all, seems to signify control, the telling of tales, the unfolding of adventures of humanity dominating nature.
Yet even the more forefront of technology the most season of captains cannot brave a cross sea.
Author’s note: Huge caveat, I know nothing of the waters at all, but found this metaphor of being captain and navigator interesting. We so often as humans want to control and dominate and feel like we’re in control of the elements (whether literally, the water itself, or metaphorically as it applies to life). But there are yet phenomena we cannot yet weather (e.g., cross sea / square waves, which are incredibly dangerous) despite that control. Also?? I love that cross sea (referring to the square waves) can also be word play on an angry sea. ❤
Wednesday: Unfreezing the body armor
Clunk! It’s been years since I’ve been oiled, my plates clanking, my joints clonking, stuck in awkward angles, bent beyond —
may someone finally grease these kinks in my armor so that I can elegantly stomp around.
Author’s note: I feel like this sometimes, possibly because for the first time in my 27 years of life I’m aware of my body, and only because I’m sitting in odd positions for days on end. My human oil — yoga — really helps stretch out some of the weirdness that stays in my body sometimes! What about you?
Thursday: Owning the very places I leak out my own power
Mr. Snowman, wintery friend, held up not by the snow that trickles from the sky but from the air that continually blows upward.
You’re the cousin of those floppy, goofy-faced strips that dance about at the front of car dealerships, beckoning buyers to come in.
These days, I feel like both of you, power leaking out through the gaps, dancing all over the place, only held up by exorbitant amounts of power to generate the air that sustains our existence.
To stop means to fold up and to fold in, all sad and deflated,
to keep on means to unsustainably waste energy.
How do I find a middle ground?
Author’s note: I just want to thank Google for knowing exactly what I was looking for when I searched “floppy air guy”.
Hi I’m Lucy Dan 蛋小姐 (she/her/她) and I wanted to thank Diana C. for this week’s set of prompts! I decided against completing all five, as I wasn’t sure what Friday’s prompt “inhibiting the communion and playful interaction with the Universe” meant, even after googling some of the terms 😂
But perhaps sometimes you encounter things and not recognize them the first time around, or the third time, or the tenth time… but someday it hits you and begins meaning something. Who knows? Stay tuned.
Hop down the rabbit hole? 🐰🕳
^ by Divina Grey
