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Fitz Cook Poem
How safe can your world possibly be
when even the school principal lines you up a couple of inches from a cinder-block wall
and punches you in the chest against the wall as he questions you.
You cannot tell your parents.
You have no one to speak to about this.
There is no one.
There is no one to tell.
This world is very dangerous.
It will not let you be anything you want to be.
It will beat you if it needs to,
to stop you from living your life.
It will not let you be who you are.
It will trap you again and again
until finally you are spirited away into another world,
God willing, not so bad.
And up at the top of the hill, your Mississippi mother knows too,
that it is too dangerous to be who you are.
So she too will try to not let you.
Connecticut and Mississippi have more in common than I used to think.
But now you have to carry all of that burden from Canner Street with you.
Inside, nowhere to tell it.
Encapsulated,
as a fester.
Hampering your every move to outdistance it.
But most importantly you have no experience of living your life,
no confidence in a world of sheer danger.
A world always just a heartbeat away even when you think you are safe.
Today it is a very progressive school.
Its darker secrets gone, swept away in gentrification.
The early post-war infusion of immigrants
replaced largely by college grad students,
with high expectations
How do we live such different lives.
How does life keep trying over and over.
I don't know. I don't know.
2009
Copyright © Fitz Cook | Year Posted 2011
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Fitz Cook Poem
I was afraid from early on to act on my passions,
because the price was too high,
life too fragile.
Instead, paying the high price of developing a fragile life
because of its been afraid to toughen.
Afraid,
believing that I did not have the right to forge a place of my own liking and compatibility in the world.
Still believing.
Still facing the unbelievably entrenched fears:
How little I can let myself, my passion, ME be me.
Someone deeply believed that my nature as a human being must be disassociated at all costs,
and I learned it.
I know it is not only me.
Others face the agony,
the excruciating pain of traveling from disassociation to identity.
And my life must not now be over.
I can still have the things I want, but I don't know how.
I have not had a family,
I have not kept faith and traveled with friends.
I have not pursued making the world need my skills and contributions
as part of the machinery of life.
I have not made my identity with myself and with humankind.
Orig 1983
Revised 2011
Copyright © Fitz Cook | Year Posted 2011
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Fitz Cook Poem
He’s 5, still is,
after all these years.
He sits and waits, frightened.
He feels hollow.
Life is too lonely now to have future.
I know he is there,
I know right where he is.
I see him.
What he knows,
what others don’t,
is that there is no escape.
There is no future.
When others do tentatively reach toward him,
it is as through the bars of a cage.
But in the intervening years,
I have come from that distant spot in his cage
through the ether that he can not discern
to the present,
and have discovered a great secret:
I now know the way!
And so I start to slip back
through mists that cloud everything.
Mists no one else can follow.
I carry music with me.
I carry dance.
I carry words to speak.
I carry form, beauty.
I carry images.
I carry sensuality.
I carry intimacy.
I carry caresses and loveliness.
I carry promise.
I know what this boy needs.
I know the pieces that have been and will be torn from him.
And the key, the key to his heart,
is that all that I carry is meant for him.
They are the nature of his heart
They are the future of his heart that has been eclipsed.
What I carry to him is the knowledge that there is a way now for him.
The mist is cool, thick,
but it is not as dangerous as the original journey.
Not so anxious, tense, frightened.
When I see him finally, he looks up.
I am on the inside of his cage.
He knows who I am.
As I reach for his hand
he puts it in mine knowing that he can.
Knowing that this too is ordained.
Not knowing what.
But knowing that he will follow to the land I lead him to.
Too young to understand all that means.
Too young to even know how to question.
Just knowing that I have, at long last, come back for him,
that at long last someone,
will take him,
to future.
Dec 2011
Copyright © Fitz Cook | Year Posted 2011
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Fitz Cook Poem
Constant pressure,
constant, constant pressure,
constantly pressure.
I could not perform
I could not satisfy them
I could not be what they wanted me to be
I could not deliver
I could not be
so I diminished myself
to someone who wasn’t
or soon would not be.
I hated it.
I hated my life with them.
I hated my life.
They wanted it from me.
They hated who I was not.
And I was miserable
for 12 years,
for 6 more years,
then for 3 or so more
till I finally said.
Stay. Away. From. School.
it is killing you.
But my soul kept trying
to redeem itself.
Trying to heal this wound in my heart.
Dec 2011
Copyright © Fitz Cook | Year Posted 2011
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Fitz Cook Poem
I went to see a love of mine today.
She stood in a wonderful red patterned caftan-like dress.
Delightful red embroidery at the throat.
She smiled, pleased, as I was, that I was there.
Her brown hair cascaded down each side of her face over her shoulders,
feathering out a welcome
Her care bespoken face, as always, carried her character, her loveliness through pain,
her ability to have faced pitted despair and found that she still wanted life.
I love seeing her face.
It somehow soothes me,
allows me to feel like I’m alright for the moment.
as though softness and tenderness do exist for my soul.
Intimacy is in her face.
Or perhaps it mirrors mine.
I don’t know.
But I know she is a love of mine.
Dec 2011
Copyright © Fitz Cook | Year Posted 2011
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Fitz Cook Poem
Sadness, loneliness, internal hopelessness,
why did she stop listening and caring what was happening in me.
The other kids, stresses with Dad, betrayal,
or just no time any more.
When did I lose whatever strength that I had.
When did I start needing the pain to be salved.
Certainly by second grade,
by the time of the day dreaming,
staring out of the windows.
Why has it crippled me so,
continued to starve my heart of its strength and endurance.
Continued to drain from me creativity and joy.
So that all I remember is the pain and struggle.
So that I cry.
So that my heart hurts.
This crying is wrong,
this hurting is wrong,
this needing is wrong,
this me is wrong.
My mother too vivid.
My pain too awful.
What was my mother to do?
Could she have said:
"You're a boy, express yourself, show yourself.
Be a man. Uncover your nature.
Show yourself,
You will need to be virile, whole, engaged, reveling in sensuality to be a man.
You will need to be smart, in touch, enjoying the game.
Talk about it.,
Say what you need.
Ask what you want.
Go on from there.
Be, be you."
Tis too late now for that.
My world is spun.
It doesn't encourage discovery.
It needs order.
It needs peacefulness.
It needs relief.
2010
Copyright © Fitz Cook | Year Posted 2011
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Fitz Cook Poem
You bring promise to me.
What had happened throughout my life I do not understand.
I wondered,
Is a soul’s expression cut down because it is no longer functional when evil reigns?
Is expression elite,
select,
for the pure of heart.
Is it no longer at the heart of work when work is all that is left.
Is it possible I can survive the loss of my mother’s faith,
the loss of my father’s hope so many years ago’
the loss of my Lucy’s life, so real and fresh.
Is it possible that the creative bulldozers she dreamed of are real.
Is it possible that life can include shalom
while destruction continues its constant rain.
Is shalom not just a myth to seduce youth and age into not despairing.
Having you with me is disturbing in my soul.
Disturbed where there is vitality and life,
mystery and still secrets,
force and calm,
creativity not yet released,
promise and hope.
It reminds me of years ago, when hope was more vivid,
when my soul believed it could express itself and not become damaged.
When I believed in soul and not evil.
Lucy believed in soul. I believed in her.
She finally did what was in her soul.
It was beautiful to watch.
It left me feeling soulless,
but I loved her,
loved her with all my heart.
You bring promise to me.
~~~
To the woman who came into my life after my wife Lucy’s death from cancer.
~1998
Copyright © Fitz Cook | Year Posted 2012
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Fitz Cook Poem
Do you know where my heart goes?
It moves in and out of me.
I don't have the strength to put it aside, work on the other things in life I value and let it find its natural place.
It longs to be with you, to feel the fingers of your love.
I'm with you and I follow the taut black material that smoothly covers and shows your lovely form.
The lines of your body pass around your legs
and present that sweet field of lush contact
that smooths out the harried hurts and wrinkles of pain inside,
as you slide in the dense moans and passions of embracing.
This sensuous promisor of deliverance from pain.
Feeling lost in the madness,
drowned in the pressure of my skin and soul against yours.
My sword wounds you, it opens up your flesh, and gives you pain.
It is also my love, and it gives you freedom.
That is what I've wanted since I first loved you and almost kissed you.
I feel in you the sledge that identifies who I am somewhere no one else can find.
Even I forget, without you.
I don't even know myself the twist inside that brings life and loft and wonder to my life. Do you know who you are?
No, you can't know,
you can't know who you are in bringing to me a stanchion
that pulls open all the mystery and mix of my innards.
The flesh pulls back when you're real
and in front of that smooth and kept-trim body that attracts so well,
all spills out that others demand be restrained,
It seems it is often the acceptance of pain that brings tenderness and understanding. It is often through the experience of pain that we love,
and loving that allows us to open up more of our pain.
It is because of pain that I can grow and become more what I am.
It is through pain that we understand life.
The willingness to embrace and survive the pain leads to life and love and freedom. Freedom to bear the loves and pains of the world a great deal more.
1982
Copyright © Fitz Cook | Year Posted 2011
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Fitz Cook Poem
Form,
Idealized form,
whichever kind you are,
building, person, painting, landscape, poem;
touches archetypes in me
Archetypes,
thank God, are funny things.
They are not usual life.
Not mundane.
They bring--
life out of me;
joy out of me;
pleasure out to me.
I can’t help but smile
and my belly warms up inside
and I live next to pleasure for a moment
or a while.
2013
Copyright © Fitz Cook | Year Posted 2013
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Fitz Cook Poem
If the people involved in these stories were to write what they experienced, I have no doubt they would feel and look and sound very different. These are not true stories that could be verified by God's objective eye. They are my story, my experiences. Lived, breathed and incorporated into my bones as foundations of who I am. For most of my life they have existed as stories I ran away from, dreaded and conspicuously avoided in building my own version of my life. Now they are becoming again the foundation stones that they are, informing me about who I am and what I bring to life, the pain and sorrow that pervade much of my interior.
They must guide me in new directions now. For they have until now seized me up like cancer in my bones: hidden, frightening, malevolent. Present, but isolated, in consciousness, from all my desires. I have been unable to dream, unable to understand life as I struggled to live without them, yet they are prescient and rich with knowledge that I didn't care about. They will not seem so striking or severe as I make them out to be, yet they have stunted my self; marked me so that I could never forget for long their power.
I come towards the end of my life in their embrace, as they demand to be given their rightful acknowledgement in my foundations.
Their tone is somber, melancholy; their history colored by who I am. Yet more deeply than any other stories, they are about me. The me that I have refused to let out into my world, because I did not want these stories to end up being the truth.
They are about sex and power, secrets and lies. Other truths wait this telling.
2006
Copyright © Fitz Cook | Year Posted 2011
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