Insomnia and Poetry

Failure has its blessings. When we realize we have failed ourselves or the people we love we find ourselves at the bottom, right? Eating dirt, faces in the mud, cheek on the porcelain tiles, lying prostrate before our God or no God, pleading inside and out for forgiveness, to wipe it clean, to take it back, to eat our words we regret. And then the night ahead looms dark and lonely, the never ending turn of the wheel, replaying the tape again and again until the sound of our own voice is maddening, the mistake a loop we can't escape. The night doesn't come or go calmly, it sticks to your skin like cobwebs, itching at the edges.

And then the light cracks through and a hush before the shiver of the day and you ask and grace appears or is given or you reached into the pit of it all and grabbed grace for yourself, tired of the headbanging. And with hindsight, you can look back at your stumblings and start the Great Teaching Speeches: how can you get up without falling down? its what gives you strength. what won't kill you...

But the reality is these trippings hurt. Badly. They ache and rock and roll you away from sleep and its only in the blindspots can you shake it off, stop the tape, shut down the critic.

Is it better to have reached for something just beyond your grasp, fail and fall, then never to have made the attempt? That's what poets say. But maybe sometimes the stretching just plain hurts and sometimes you wish you didn't even see the dream. But then, that's what a heaven's for...

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mind.

Meanwhile, the world goes on.

--Mary Oliver