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| (by glucken) |
I have written before of this. I have several stories I tell on myself. They are true in the heart's way, the soul's way. This poem is one of them or at least a slant view of one of them. There was a bus. I was traveling on that bus to some destination. We reached a way station and following the rest of the crowd, I got off here. I got distracted. When I realized what had happened I tried to find that bus. It had already left and I have been waiting for another ever since. I am not where I am supposed to be but instead am stranded in a way station and I make the best of it as I can. I am sad underneath, and bewildered, for I don't understand how such a small oversight has left me so bereft. I have no idea how to call the bus, nor any clear idea why it would not signal or wait for me. Sometimes I think it was deliberate.
This is just a story like a myth is "just a story". It is true to my heart and I know I am not the only one. There are many who feel the true home is somewhere else and that this life is a journey in some form or other. When I discovered Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung, Mircea Eliade and many others I learned that there is a universal mythos that points to elsewhere and makes claims for the truer and finer nature of that place. That was a relief to me, that I share this otherness in my bones with so many threads of humanity.
The primary truth of it is that it is so personal. Even though so many of us share this yearning, each of us yearns alone. At least that is how it feels to me.
My mother said of her experience of this feeling that she wondered all her life, "where does an alien go to register?"
Kicked Off The Bus
I shall fall apart
flying through the cold gray air,
landing on the grit
packed down at full speed
by so many who ignore
my daily losses.
I shall separate,
become the drab emptiness,
sad indifference,
lie here raw, exposed
before the weeping lost God
of this dead old world.
December 18, 2009 7:47 AM
I have that feeling at times myself. More often than not however I feel like I keep getting hit by the bus rather than missing it or being kicked off of it. At these times I have a feeling of overt displacement. As if it were not only intentional but whomever left me behind wanted to make their intentions clear that they felt I did not belong with the rest.
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