What doesn’t kill you …
I have studied and treated and written about the thing we call trauma over the years. Trauma is a destroyer of minds/bodies and relationships and careers and lives. Trauma is the child of violence and malevolence and cruelty.
Some time ago, I decided to explore the contours of trauma’s dark landscape by engaging in a journey of free association, letting the words and images flow and form of their own volition. I assembled them in free-verse form below. It’s a different way of illuminating this extreme human experience.
If you are struggling with the effects of traumatic experience, you might find some of the imagery disturbing. You can stop reading here if you think it best. 🚧 🤚
Lost City Elegy by Baird Brightman New things are becoming old to me. Electric windows are closing on my thoughts and motors drive me out of the city into a countryside of night, a sort of life in airy music and words that stream from my mouth. There is a woman here who dances. My music makes her roll and turn about until the buildings spring up between us jostling us unkindly apart and sending me once again out of town into the silent country. There stands a blackness in my brain. My eyes are clouded with it. A smoke rises from my stomach burning an even heat as the vapors rise and the road turns aside and goes down toward a paper horizon on which some child is gluing foil stars and a big cardboard sun that’s torn and the wrong shade of yellow. Alone could be a life, a sort of house, small and spare, one horse, one pot, a wood stove, and eyes that wince at mirrors with their years of reflections. Then all these greetings could be made in sleep and crying in the stillness with none to share uncluttered by footsteps in the grass. Yet there is something to say for people. They smile you up into smiles and hold you together with their arms. They find you alone and end the storms that blow such wrack in lonely minds. They hold you in harbor while the wind blows soft off the land. Beyond this last step there will be peace. An angel promised this to me as she stood with windy wings and eyes swimming in oceans that poured down her cheeks. She smiled through her tears as she lied. Oh joy! Oh god! Oh man! Oh me! Winds blow! Suns collide and sparkle in your eyes! Mountain wave forms hold rhythm. Sun beats wildly in tune. Earth cools the beat in time with ocean baseline. Dig me here in mind in universal signs and silence. How deaf to thunder babies are and how that needle in the sky is letting it all out on the floor. Won’t give you music anymore. No songs to sing. No words to say.
Rich, Evocative, Disturbing, Painful, Pain, Weep, Live on.
There’s a line between writing about trauma and writing from it. This felt like the latter to me. You write about this stuff only when you’ve walked through it. Respect for that Baird...