I believed them when they told me
"Seek and ye shall find."
I laid down the gauntlet to their God
At age thirteen
In a moment of screeching pain
Alone in a back room
Homeless, motherless,
Myself the embodiment of my father's disillusion,
I gouged the precious mahogany of my stepmother's heirloom,
And beseeched my father's righteous God,
"Show me, I beg you."
For twenty-three years I have sought.
I paid for damages,
Subsequently baptized in a chlorinated swimming pool,
Successfully performing as their God wanted,
Friendly, obedient, a straight-A student,
I sang of protective love on Sundays and was warm.
But the Negroes beyond the city boundary were off-limits,
As was my check to CARE,
As was even my mother.
The water was overheated, too sanitary, unreal.
I believed her when she told me
"God is love."
I loved my mother's God
At age fifteen,
And curled in her womb
Alone in my own room
Through hours of quiet
I yielded will and learned to merge.
A full Colorado night, sitting on a rock
Alone with the moon and three mountains
In the crotch of a loch,
Defined the space of love, my reference source.
But yearning still for my father,
To mother unfaithful in my yearning,
Undirected, fatherless,
Myself my mother's false dream,
I turned my back to both at last
At eighteen
And gave my body to experiment,
Finding neither love nor answers.
Denying my father's God,
I represented his greatest fear
(He chastised me for his own integrity).
Losing my mother's God,
I became the lost sheep of her own fantasy
(Unaware, she led me to the slaughter).
They showed me a third god
In the form of a balding shrink with manicured hands,
Who led me into the valley of the images of truth
In which one believes and does not seek
In which one loves and does not care,
In which one dwells in the house of the apparent forever.
I was good at obliging
(At the time I was young and wholesome)
And so was freed
Only to retreat again to my room
To pick up my own gauntlet,
To seek, if there were no God,
At least one truth,
Something real already glimpsed
Through father, mother, doctor,
Unknown to them.
The only honest thing in our world --
Music --
Opened a secret door,
Focusing, merging,
Racing headlong into the Known
I arrived at the obvious
In a short space of time.
The same old world opened to perfect clarity,
A beauty so particular and so universal
That I laughed that we had not seen it sooner.
All was a beautiful joke I rushed to share,
Only to find that I occupied an oasis,
A garden so elemental that my mother
Called it mirage,
My father refused to look,
And my doctor called it psychosis.
Desert dwellers fear water.
Developers destroy trees.
They shot me with Thorazine
And strapped me in a strait jacket.
They took what I had found
And locked it up
Until it went away.
And so it went.
Brainwashed in their gods' truths,
I was good, and I did as expected. I learned to type,
I married,
I kept the kitchen floor spotless,
I was a stepmother,
I was a mother,
I ironed sheets and shorts,
I even went to church
(A mistake: I still asked the priests unwanted questions).
And the witch returned,
I could not keep it down,
No longer a maid but an hysterical hag
Hungry for her wedding feast aborted,
Thirsty enough to drink poison.
Dangerous to society,
Locked up again.
(I am a hag,
A madwoman enamored of her madness.)
They took my children away;
I became a mother with full breasts
And no baby;
But I girded my chest to go forth,
And still another cycle started,
A short enough interlude --
Free from husband and parents,
I was what I was,
A writer --
But I did not count on the clamp of patriarchy
Whose steel indifference maims,
And so is my right hand crippled.
Neither has love brought refuge,
For I learned to truly love -- a woman --
But she, too, hypnotized by the material
Is leaving:
My wrathful sub-surface bursting forth
Does not admit to healing,
It is too raw for her
And monsters make her uncomfortable,
She turns her back.
I am a hag,
A madwoman enamored of her madness --
The only real thing I know is the vision,
My so-called life is nothing but ashes,
Pain applied to agony,
In a world where common is called best,
Nothing is called truth,
Seeking is considered folly,
And finding is a euphemism for blind acceptance.
I have been force-fed nectar
So sweet that it is putrid,
So foul that I vomit over my own body shackled to a hospital bed.
My stomach is not as strong as it once was,
And I prefer hemlock to ambrosia.
I can't tolerate false gods,
I don't even care about gods.
I just seek some truth --
Show me, I beg you,
For twenty-three years I have sought.
Sally Clay
April 1978
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***** Sharewrite 1994 Sally Clay ****
sallyclay@aol.com *****
Published in The Altered State, journal of the Altered States of the Arts,
March 1994. Permission is granted for personal or electronic distribution
of this document as long as it is unchanged in any way and this notice
is included. For permission to reprint it for general publication,contact me
at 72 Barrett St., Apt. 212, Northampton, MA 01060, or by e-mail.
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