buffeted

 

feeling to the fore

I am forthright about feelings,

both my own and others',

my subconscious shouts at me in dreams,

repeating my fears, amplifying them,

exquisitely crafting them into metaphor, into story,

a recurring quandary of being lost

in terms of where my body is,

place shifted so as to not be familiar,

not recognizable within my spatial sense,

no longer that where I am fits into a sureness

of where everything else is,

my car not where I thought I'd left it,

or rather the "where" it was

is no longer the "there" I can find,

my default emotional state has me self-confident, happy,

but my fears, my angst, easily shove themselves to the fore,

and I feel the sorrow all too ready

to remind me of how transitory the moment is,

how much each tick of the clock whispers "loss,"

a callous can shield the skin

from feeling the repeated reality that comes at it,

I seek to name, and still feel,

each reality that comes at me,

to name it, to feel the buffeting,

to still hold to the constant within

while also holding all that buffets,

both from without and from within.

by Henry H. Walker

August 1, ‘24