This war

This war has made me cry out loud

This war has robbed me of sleep

This war gives me nightmares

This war has messed with my immune system

(I think this war it has shortened my life)

This war is like a strong wind blowing through my brain

This war has made me feel alone and hollow

This war has made me let the phone ring

It has turned me into a news junky

This war has stung me, shocked me,

Bruised me, cudgeled me, numbed me

Beyond tears, I sometimes I feel like the living dead

Because of this war

How will we ever forgive this war!

This war has forced me to do the math

It has made me not care how I look

It has made me drink more wine

And bolt my door when I go to bed

This war has brought violence to my sanctuary

It has made me hear voices in the wind

It has made me miss my mother

It has made me nostalgic for the bad old days

It has made me renew my passport

It has made me forget to water the plants

It has made me harder to talk to

This war has made me watch more sh*t TV

It has made me lie awake listening to my heart

It has made me forget to take my supplements

It made me purchase a blue light

It makes me prowl on rainy days

It has made me feel like an animal in a cage

It has made me feel worse about climate change

It has made me feel worse about any kind of change

It has made my brain fog, my heart freeze

It almost made me get a tattoo

It made me feel like I was in a tragic play

A movie that was going to end badly for my character

It made me cry when I hit a squirrel

It made the traffic on the bridge sound angry

It makes me choose sides

It makes me feel that it could happen to me

It has taught me that it doesn’t take much

For people to do terrible things

It made me clean the basement

It made me eat more ice-cream

………………

It feels like being in limbo, to me, to be living with another war that invades one’s sanctuary and stirs up a powerful response that has no where to go, so one begins to feel beaten up and hollowed. Of course we would like to put an end to such wars but we can’t so we just eat more ice-cream. Being in the war, literally, would be a different kind of ordeal. This poem is about living with the war in me.

A friend calls these my list poems, and he doesn’t particularly like them, but sometimes they are the only kind of poem I can write when something is neither within me nor without me. It helps as a way to organize or separate my emotions so that I can get on with my life in “this world of woe”.

The phrase “traveling through this world of woe” comes from “The Poor Wayfaring Stranger” (written some time in the early 1800s). “It is categorized as Gospel, Bluegrass, American Folk, Spiritual and my favorite, Gothic Country. Books have been written with the same title as well as poems and even plays, such is The Mystique. The powerful, yet simply written words, grasp one’s attention bringing thoughts about a world to come.” (Click Here)

I draw on this evocative phrase because I believe that many of us feel like “poor wayfaring strangers / traveling through this world of woe”. And there is a spiritual yearning in the way I use it here except for me the “world to come” is not heaven, but the better world that we could have right here if we could just hack the pathology in human nature that, not only makes war, but tolerates it as a woeful fact of life.