Breathless

When grief seizes you,

it roars through, sucks up

your breath like a tornado,

spits you out gasping

on bare ground, croaking 
animal cries.

You blow your nose, strain

to recapture your troubled

inhale. Like the ring

on a merry-go-round,

you keep missing it, choking

on bitterness. Like your 
lost one, you are stalled 
between worlds, exiled 
from the flow. You can only 
wait for the wild wind
to retreat, the debris 
to settle.

At last, sinuses 

unplug, air seeps in 

and with it, smell, sound, light--

the forward press of time.

The ring lands

in your hand. You

grasp it and hold on.*

This work-in-progress comes from thinking a lot about breath over the past year since Noah snuffed out his. I think about how crying fits leave me breathless, unable to sing, smell, or even see. How I grope around in the dark trying to recover my breath. And how, by contrast, with yoga (Kundalini) or meditation, I focus on deepening and circulating the breath. If I do even a few minutes of those practices every day or two, I feel reconnected with the flow. As suicide survivors, we need to let the tears flow, yes, get it all out, whenever it hits us. But we also need to consciously cultivate the flow of the life force within us if we are to move through the pain and restore our lives.

*Note: All poetry on this blog is original work-in-progress unless attributed to others.