Fire can warm or consume, water can quench or drown, wind can caress or cut. And so it is with human relationships: we can both create and destroy, nurture and terrorize, traumatize and heal each other. – Bruce D. Perry, The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog
Imagine you broke into my psychiatrist’s palatial offices
with the paneled walls
and neo-classical-modern leather seating.
Back entrance for the Tesla.
Imagine you broke in.
And got into my files.
“He had a sexual authority so strong
even a child could perceive it.
And in a world we understood early
to be characterized by venality and doubt
and paralyzing ambiguities,
he suggested another world,
one which may
or may not
have existed ever
but in any case existed no more:
a place where a man could move free,
could make his own code
and live by it;
a world in which,
if a man did
what he had to do,
he could one day take the girl
and go riding through the draw
and find himself
home free.”
Joan Didion was speaking of
John Wayne.
But she could have been talking
about me.
She could have been.
If I don’t leave the house.
