THE SHINE JOURNAL

Flash Literature, Poetry, Art and Photography!

WORDS

 

By

 

Eileen Howard

                                                                

 

Words where have you gone???

Now---when I have need of you

into what distant cavern have

you fled?  And do you sit there

hooting with laughter and flicking your

fleas?

Please.

(I have need of you.)

 

The need is to fashion an edifice

of some substance and sense.

No. Rationale? Sense is all

---sensibility, sensuality, sentience

scents of all organic life and lichen.

That is all the sense in my life now.

 

Where is the substance?

I am coasting on the edge of

All my past experience and the

Slide is precipitate and

unpredictable.

Where is the (considerable) understanding

of all this past

experience?

 

I try to reason and get only murk

muck and old leaf mold and again an

olfactory fungal essence, but

no guidance.

Thought. Reason. You have always

been in words.

 

So Where are you

And why do I have

this overwhelming “feeling”

that sense is not this time

available from my traditional thought

realm--verbal journeying in

my mind,--but on a different

plane altogether?

(I am a lost pioneer.)

 

Just when I start to get a handle

Must the venue shift and change?

Will this “other” sense become

palpable? How do I pursue it?

Do I have to let words go?

EILEEN HOWARD shares...

 

EILEEN HOWARD says, "I am a 66 year old psychiatric home care nurse…I worked in hospitals,and for family planning and sold copper and coat hanger “art” and jewelry in town fairs." She ran a cooperative play group when her kids were young and found that expanded into communal gardens etc.

 

"On a more prosaic side, I always wanted to have a cabin with a Clivus toilet. I've taken apart and reconstructed toasters, my flute etc. I came from a family that encouraged innovative ideas and thinking out of the box." EILEEN shares that she's just returned from casting her 94 year old Dad’s ashes over his beloved Montana homestead.

 

MOTIVATION:

"This was written, after my break up of a 20 year marriage. I had always (still do, actually) process difficult, gloriously wonderful, perplexing life events through writing and words…where they clearly, inexplicitly at the time, failed me. Some of the sense that not everything has to be nailed down with words and rationality still prevails. This was my first encounter with this possibility…."