sir reel iii
O clever kismet, worn by sea
Child of volatility
Cast upon the listless beach
From patterned, fractured poles did reach
With desperate hands on wounded knees
Pickled glands shouting salted pleas
And on and on, it goes and goes
And on again, in anguished throes
Denying that which it already knows
A cunning, baffling disease
Set sail upon the wistful breeze
From wet, cold wreckage souls beseech
Old familiar shoals to breach
O clever kismet, worn by sea
Vessel of humility
🐚 🚢 🌸
It was April 6, 2021. I’d just met up with a close friend at one of my favorite beach spots in Playa del Rey, catching up after a few seasons worth being out of touch. I was about to graduate from treatment and a week away from six months sober. A fragment of a seashell found its way into my hand and I took it with me to remember the occasion.
Later, on a whim, I decided to drive up to the Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook to take my therapy telehealth session there and wandered around afterward. I paused as I came across this single flower poking out into one of the hiking trails and realized I’d been carrying the shell around, rubbing it softly between my thumb and forefinger. Something compelled me to hold it up to the flower and take this photo, and at that moment the line “clever kismet, worn by sea…” came to me like a mantra.
The line continued repeating in my head through the rest of that day and into the next morning. It was my last creative writing class at the IOP and I felt inspired to incorporate it into the session that day. To my delight, it was a poetry exercise. A perfect capstone to my favorite group! I wrote it down as the opening line to my new masterpiece. To my chagrin, I spent most of the hour staring at the page, my mind straining. Every other week, the words flowed effortlessly, producing some of my best “work.” Why would this be any different?
I left that day frustrated and confused but with the foundation for what has grown into the third and final entry in the “sir reel” series, a trilogy of surreal musings connected to the process of recovery (you can find the other two if you dig through my posts or website). This one presents a succinct, quasi-nautical summary of the progression of my dual diagnoses as illuminated by my step work up through step six. I had to sit with that step for a while.
It’s fitting, then, that the process of completing this one took months, maybe over a year. I kept circling back, filling in a line here, replacing a word there. The word choice, structure, meter, and rhyme scheme just had to be absolutely perfect for it to see the light of day. And I wasn’t happy with the dood I intended to accompany it; it felt like something was missing, or needed some digital transmogrification with the original photo that inspired it to correlate to the weight of the poem. I wasn’t willing to let it go, at the same time discovering a lot about myself I wasn’t willing to let go, because it was all I’d ever known and I was terrified of the unfamiliar.
I’ve come to learn that letting go is a practice, not a single act.