My sister once said she thought all people are lazy if they don’t have a reason to work. I think that is funny because she is constantly cooking up ideas that put her to work, even though she does not have a strong financial need right now. In a parallel world, I have been wondering if all people are hypocrites. Lately I have really been noticing the conflict in my life, especially how my thoughts and actions so often go against my convictions. Spiritually, in family issues, in my temperament, in my lifestyle my deeds are conflicting with my ideals.

For a long time I have called myself a Quaker, but I have been angry mildly violent. I have been thinking of myself as Pansexual, but in all my actions I am asexual and intimacy should be a beautiful thing. I want my birth family to know who I am and to support them and be supported by them, but I feel unsupported by them and consequentially negative towards them or negative in their eyes. I am on disability money and I have less money than I am used to this year because of an accident involving overpay; and my financial situation is awful right now to the point that I cannot go to therapy. I am bipolar and I know how integral therapy is for my life and vitality and even statistically speaking, my longevity. According my mother and temporary landlady I am “too intense” at times. And I agree that I am intense, but I believe it is more difficult to be intense than to experience it in a tenant or even a family member whom you love unconditionally and overpoweringly, which she does. I am a person who around alcohol and drugs is a teetotaler, but who has an addictive personality when it comes to coffee or television and in my heart of hearts, I hate television. I am conflicted about my father because I love him so much but I act like a baby around him, and I don’t know how to take control of myself when I am with him or even on the phone. Even politics, a subject distant from spirituality, is making me crazy because I don’t want to be aware of all of the horrors of the world anymore because this “sick sad world” is breaking me apart. Yet, a part of me thinks it is my duty as an activist and a person of this world to open the paper, help lead the rally against the KKK in my home town, and listen to Democracy Now! I feel the gas I use is red with blood and the money I spend still smells of the explosives used on the Mountaintop Removal sites from where all cash seems to pass and flow. This next thing is kind of funny, but it is the most important of all of these. My spiritual existence and the poetry of my life have tumbled down at least lately. These are the core components of who I am. These two things are being pummeled: my spirituality and her twin sister poetry. I am feeling lost in this respect. Is my spirit still here? I wonder. Can I bring back my poetry?

I want to be who I really am though, so badly. I crave Maggie more than any specific thing. I feel sometimes that other people’s voices are running my head and that I am walking in the wrong direction and I don’t know how to fix things. I have these wonderful days when I am entirely unwilling to recognize the conflict and hypocrisy in my life. Perhaps my happy times are causing me to forget this need for direction, a need that exists all the time. I need to draw a map of where I am going and where I am in order to be Maggie. I see Maggie so rarely. I need to draw a picture of who I am and hold onto it like it and keep true to myself, my spirit, my poet within.

Though all that I said is true, it also is true that I have never written anything that is not a poem. I walk and speak poetry. I am a poet, and a poem. I am a good hearted person. I constantly seek to do the right thing deep in my core. I make mistakes; I am human. One of my biggest mistakes is that I second guess myself and apologize too much and feel guilty for things that are not my fault. I even would be a good mother. I know that. I know who I am. I know what I perceive that others think of me, and I sometimes don’t think they give me enough credit. But my insecurities are less important than my appetite for beauty in language and environment. My spirit is full of kindness and when she stops crying, Maggie is still there always hopeful. Maggie is here and I am not going anywhere away from this body until death, and that will be in a very long time. I have always known that I am a child of God. It has been difficult to grow up in an atheistic family, to love God and be angry at God, even to deny God periodically. Now I know that God is in me. God is in everything from poetry to the mountains to every human that I know.

God and poetry are in me through everything I do and all that happens to me. My job is to preserve them and honor them. I am the one who needs to give myself credit for all the wonderful words I write and all the poems that I live.