Who suffers more, the watcher or the watched? The leaver or the left?
Vigil Questions
Author: joanvinallcox
Joan Vinall-Cox, Ph.D. is a lifelong learner, retired communications professor, and rabid reader who has taught in both the college and university systems.
Her Ph.D., in 2004 was an Autoethnographic Arts-Based Narrative Inquiry focused on moving from technophobia to technophilia.
She is a widow from a pretty happy marriage and a mother to a strong and kind daughter.
Her interests include Centering Prayer, Multiple Intelligences, Attention Deficit Disorder and its connection to creativity, Jung, Campbell’s Monomyth, and Arts-Based Narrative Inquiry.
Sorrow Creeps
Sorrow creeps
up the stairs; banisters help.
Tomorrows are collapsing.
Dreamspace
An Excerpt
O send me disorienting dreams, I pray, and save me from a rational life.
Cognitive Dissonance
The shadow of a bird flew across the sunlit pillar to the noise of destruction: Cognitive dissonance.
Lost Password
I’ve lost the password to what used to be my life.
The air is strange and I’m losing my sense of balance.
I search through remnants scattered in the home I sold,
Wondering what to keep, or sell, or trash.
In the coffeeshop, the chatter is of family discord:
Recent losses, expected deaths, and mangled hopes
Fall like tears from the balcony, splashing on me,
Where I sit, trying to create a new password.
The Arms Merchants
The arms merchants recruit the awful hungers
of the power mongers and trim their synapses
with greed
Then power mongers hypnotically whisper
to the shamed and lonely ones filled with rigid angers
and find the hungriest to bombast
“the Others are thieves who want
what’s ours. Stop them. Guns!
guns, guns, guns.”
Making ghosts of our children.
Silence
In the silence of a broken tv old stories clamour. Without the noise of distant horrors and injustices, old and Intimate pains begin to throb. The distraction of the world’s tremors is lost and what has been forcefully swallowed regurgitates pushing out into this unsought silence. Is this a healing? Are these imprisoned stories releasing into a cleansing or into renewed nauseous festering. Is there meaning in the silence?
Fortitude
What’s left after the washing is put away and the dishes are done? What’s left after they all leave without waving goodbye? I close myself in the small room with my past struggles and accomplishments and reach for . . . What’s left after anger and desolation? What’s left is an old woman reaching out to find what’s left when she becomes invisible, unheralded, alone and waiting to find out who she will now become.
Encountering the Other
Deimatic behaviour or startle display[1] means any pattern of bluffing behaviour in an animal that lacks strong defences,” Wikipedia – https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deimatic_behaviour
The wounded other strikes me like a fearful ghost in deimatic display , bluffing poisonously. (My gramma taught me how to breathe in cold times) I close my mouth and breathe through my filtering nose - to clear the air.
Seeking Consciousness
Trying to see what you lost in the park across the road years ago - standing in front of sheer curtains looking through a window in the moonless foggy dark A spark flickers A shock shivers oh!
Learning Living 