Broken Things
From a teen of 18, for the next six years,
my life and time were given to broken men.
Some of that time was also given to the lives
of kids who were the 'would be broken' men
unless they encountered some kind of intervention.
They were drug addicts, alcoholics, and gang members.
One never forgets the look of emptiness in the eyes of an
alcoholic, or the visible tracks and scars left behind on the arms
of heroin addicts. Nor can one mute the voices of an addict who says,
"My past is behind me, and my life has been changed, but these scars
that remain need never be removed because they are reminders of my past.
Our lives are indeed a journey, ever mobile and in a constant state of navigation. Like the Japanese art of Kintsugi and Kintsukuroi*, some wounds and breakages in life require repairs but need not be hidden, disguised, or covered with masks. They are indeed very much a part of our history that flows with us into the future.
081621PSCtest, Broken, Craig Cornish
*Kintsugi (???, "golden joinery"), also known as kintsukuroi (???, "golden repair"), is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum, a method similar to the maki-e technique. As a philosophy, it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise. Kintsugi - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kintsugi
Copyright © Curtis Johnson | Year Posted 2021
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