I awoke at 4 am with a hard sore spot behind my ear. Since my eyes are not on two fleshy protuberances, I cannot swing them around to see what it is. I suspect I have just experienced my fourth spider bite this year. The poisonous brown recluse was apparently able to shed its shyness long enough to crawl down my shirt and leave its acid flesh-eating gift on my back. I immediately called the doctor and began antibiotics and antibiotic creams. The brown crater of dead flesh is a permanent testimonial to the beast’s intention. Next, within weeks, I attracted a black window bite and took precautions quickly.

I used to be on fire

This last one surprises me. There is some form of Jack London survival short story about how a spider found me at night, crawled into my hair, and settle on a place behind my ear to attack.

I thought about why these events all happened in a few weeks and then just let it go. I am, after all, a mere mortal. I cannot know the intent of the Spider Gods.

I am preparing for surgery #2 and #3 as I limp around the house using my time travel mind to imagine what I will need next to me in the future.

Oh, I think. I forgot to select the poems for the October poetry reading online. I interrupt my slow hobble around the house and sift through the piles of poems I have printed up. Too many computers have died taking years of creations with them for me to any longer trust them. But the paper is reassuring.

As I sift through the poems I am surprised.

“These are good,” I think.

I had forgotten myself in the small, quiet life since 2021. I had forgotten that words of intimate intensity would flow through me into my writing. I had forgotten standing on a stage performing my poems and having people say, “You frightened me. I was shaking. I cried.”

Intensity of beauty

So I am curious as to the layers of the self. This Victorian housekeeper with weak eyes pulling aside a curtain to observe others on the street is not the same presence as the Tank Girl Punk poet, is she?

Or is the mistake I have made about myself that the chaotic passion of my words and the days of reclusive, shy silence are both aspects of “the self”?

Even holding those poems in my hands and reading them reminds me that there is the fire inside me. It feels good. I have not felt its heat for 1,723 days, but who is counting?

fearless expression

I move past the spider bites, the year of stabbing hip pain, and the deep isolation into the next transfiguration of my identity. It is complex, multilayered and dynamic.

Let It Rip!