Calm to Commotion

With the calm comes a silence,

a lesser need to declare.

The snarls

of my empathic temperment

are detached and unnoticeable,

as if a part of me is missing

or much too far away.

Who am I

without the constant scuttling

of thoughts, sensations, and humor?

Where is my voice?

What is my poem?

What is the picture to paint?

They say that those who've lived

a tumultuous life

find the calm unsettling, unsatisfactory,

as if the steady seas

are much too lifeless without the white-tipped waves crashing against the rocky shoreline,

steadily wearing the stones to pieces.

Without the rising and falling tides,

there is no rocking,

no rhythm,

nothing to tear you apart 

and 

nothing to lull you to sleep.

I know not my place and purpose

when passion and emotion quell,

when each day passes with ease,

and my pallette and song

have no contrast and no contradiction.

When steady,

I feel listless and lame,

like roadkill smashed flat on

the hot, black tar 

of a road heading nowhere,

except to death.

I can, however,

conjure the dance,

with the muscle memory

of a performer

who learned to Tango long ago.

From stillness in limbs and core,

I create a rumbling within

that feels like the jostling 

of a nearby train

or thunder

from the skies of a nearby town,

drawing closer to spit and weep

where I stand.

Come to me, my murderous muse.

Invite the devils and cherubs to play

in the shadows, in the light,

so I have a playmate, a partner,

to swirl and circle around

this uniformity, 

like a mad pair of Whirling Dervishes

getting high off of

their intoxicating dance.

I love to be dizzy with sensation,

to have emotion course through me

so I speak with fire, 

paint in reds and purple,

and trapeze from wrung to wrung

in constant commotion - 

chattering

and clamoring -

so I do not go unnoticed

and do not forget

I am here.