How does it work, this coming of terms?
Does it mean that I have become so well acquainted
with the hitherto nameless horror
that it has been subject to the indignity of taxonomy?
And having been accorded a category, title and alias,
It now sits meekly on a shelf, between First Heartbreak and
Car Crash.
Does it matter, the terms I choose?
Is honesty important, with labels like:
“The Time I Tried to Kill Myself After A Year of Failures”.
Or should I encrypt my grief and mask it with mockery.
After all, “Miss Tiddlywinks” or “The Jellybean” doesn’t
sound so bad.
Making what was an unimaginable, indescribable blow
an amusing misadventure in my madcap life.
Could it be the power is in the act of articulation?
And by capturing and framing the wound in words,
I am able to loose its piercing grip and evict it from my heart?
Or are the ‘terms’ to come to instead a relationship,
That I must concede between the thing and I?
A point of shared reference so close that we become family,
(And the sins of family can be borne no matter the cost).
But then, perhaps I am being too abstract.
And “come to terms” was always intended as an order.
Where “terms” was somewhere to go.
A mystical place where the wounded heal,
And no aching loss or painful memory can follow.
Because I have tried all these approaches but the last
And I am still not there.
