You know that helpless feeling you get when you know you’ve forgotten something major like turning off the stove or closing the garage or making that phone call you absolutely had to make or returning that package that had to be in within 30 days? I call that feeling Monday.
My experience with Mondays is like being carried along upon the crest of an impossible wave. I can see the entire shape of reality beneath me and I know that above and behind is only darkness. I know that in that darkness lies terrible responsibility. I have not escaped from that responsibility. Time pushes me along and threatens to break, to crash, at any moment. Meanwhile I, awake and alive with the fears of responsibility and failure, hold on tightly to the board beneath my feet.
But there is no board. There is only the wave and once I see it; once I am forced to realize this truth I plunge through the foamy blue-green water whereupon my sight is stolen from me and I discover that I can no longer move forward. I cannot swim. I cannot float to the surface. Instead the crushing weight of life seeps through my pores filling me with a calm that can be only described as oblivion.
To quote Neruda:
That’s why Monday, when it sees me coming
with my convict face, blazes up like gasoline,
and it howls on its way like a wounded wheel,
and leaves tracks full of warm blood leading toward the night.
Some Thoughts:
- A writer I recently worked with referred to poetry as a palette cleanser. I need to take stock in that idea and move myself towards these brief moments of truth. My palette needs a good cleansing.