Warm mug of phantom poetry: episode 14, feat Jen Fagala, illness part 2 - a podcast by N. J. Saroff

Here is Jen Fagala reading it's wild geese by Mary oliver

You do not have to be good.You do not have to walk on your kneesfor a hundred miles through the desert repenting.You only have to let the soft animal of your bodylove what it loves.Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.Meanwhile the world goes on.Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rainare moving across the landscapes,over the prairies and the deep trees,the mountains and the rivers.Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,are heading home again.Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,the world offers itself to your imagination,calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -over and over announcing your placein the family of things.


What disociating feels like
Sometimes I forget I'm writing
While I'm actaully writing
It's like I'm just watching myself writing
Like I'm focussed on it but zoned out while doing it
It's like riding a bicycle and looking up at the sky and you forget your pedaling and feel like you're just walking while watching looking up at the clouds, I guess it's odd to use that metaphor because I still don't know how to ride a bike, some would say this means writing is fluid to me comes naturally I can do it in my sleep, but I think it's cause my mind drift, its like I'm on another planet but I don't know how I got there maybe it's a moon because I can feel the gravitational pull of another planet pulling me down and I can do nothing about it I'm from another planet I feel like I'm watching everything it's a completely different planet then the first two mentioned but there I am watching this moon be pulled by another planet through a telescope and I am Bound by telescope unable to Move It from that position of watching and yet I even look through a telescope in years so how can I use a metaphor about telescope when I don't even know how to use one.
Sometimes while doing something I feel like I'm not the person doing it, like I'm not really there, it's like being trapped in a cloud which is partially gas, but distracted you because it's fluffy and light, and as it floats away with you in it you see that it's hard to capture it hard to pull it down so you lay in the sky stuck to the cloud, watching from above the life that is happening with someone who is you but doesn't feel like you. I've never touched a cloud never felt a cloud I just know how to describe them but maybe they aren't like that at all, maybe disociate is something indescribable like the cloud.

I disociation, tiptoe away from reality and begin to tell someone else story, I tell of the lives of others that effected me, but not my own story, my mind wanders away from the page and I think about the people who die in winter i wonder how do you dig a grave in the cold frozen soil beneath the fresh snow of the morning Ground. I should not be thinking about death while breathing life into these words while giving birth to a poem but I am, maybe we look up at the sky, not because we see the beauty but draw our eyes away from falling off the flipped over bike.


Vaccination for anxiety: after plath
By N. J. Saroff 2018

The moans of those lost never wanting to be found are left to their own devices they shake the building with their vibrations, the walls inhale their cries of pain, the paint chips off and sticks to the hollow grave yard beds they sleep in.

In the middle of the night doctor depression walks in the door squeaking open, I do not wake to the sound of his presence. His sharp needle stabs me in the brain, injecting me with a sadness serum, I do not flinch, I have come to expect this ritual, I only exhale fog into the cold empty night of darkness.

The white of the room is stained yellow by age, the sheets once grey have a brownish tint to them now, the nervous nurse closes the window, chaining the balcony to stop the flyers. The rainy winds flood the lake, we drown ourselves in bath tubs, our burial homes swept away by the storm.



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