Poetry by Theresa C. Gaynord

                   whatcanyouseenow! ghosts and stuff CC

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​​The Power of Release 
​

I'm walking up the path to the Cloisters,
the one by Fort Tryon Park near Jewish
Memorial Hospital where we spent an
afternoon having my chin stitched up after
that nasty fall I took in the hallway of our
art-deco apartment building on Arden Street.

The trees are still standing their ground
except for the few sick ones that now lay
dead and broken in fragments across the trail.
The clouds are still moving steadily across
the river and I'm naming them with the same
knowledge you passed along to me.

I'm still sucking on watermelon candies and
Tootsie roll pop, but I miss the chocolate
shortbread cookies you used to get me, the
ones that made me smile when I was feeling
down. The child is stirring Dad, against the
winds that run wild moving empty swings.

The world might go to war and I'm scared
even as I think about that blue-winged
dragonfly we once saw low-flying then
darting upward in winter. And I dream about
the wonders that will bewilder once this
story is told.

Maybe that's why I seek some kind of blessing
through poetry. I stop and take in the
scenery of the woods and the stonewall that
brings your memory from afar with the same
fleeting happiness I once had while smelling a
pink carnation.

If I write with velocity it's because I'm mindful
of the fact that I'm dying. Cancer may not be
eating away at me as it did you but I can feel
my body shutting down slowly and without
compassion. Mamma Della says she's got some
kind of gris-gris bag waiting on me at the Botanica.

You remember Mama Della, don't you dad? The
Santera who said she was under the protection
of the thunder god Chango. The one who kissed
my forehead after Elegua claimed me as a child
of his own. As I reach the end of this path I
feel perilously unanchored.

Yet I still remember to release while I take in
small breaths.





Impending Doom


The horizon shifts and I feel it in the form of a vertical movement,
my soul an independent system aligned to the impending feeling
of doom, transferable between dimensions, related yet separate
and independent.

My life’s force takes me to the next level where I await the ‘crash’.
There are bridges that collapse as I take a step beyond my own
consciousness, and I’m aware of the electrical sparks that suddenly
shatter in my internal environment.

In actuality, I’m riding it out, and once the process is complete I’ll 
be okay again as he dawn stretches out rolling hills, fertile, wide, as
black drapes open to the morning light. Today the confusion comes
from vulnerability,

From finally reaching the point of knowing that everything that begins
must come to an end. It’s the threat of rain that has me choosing my
words so carefully, as I pace anxiously between realizations and
understandings.

I fear something more personal, beyond self, beyond mortality. I fear
abandonment, the routine symbolized in the lethargy of life that weighs 
us down, stains our souls with solitude, as I pick up handfuls of cold
sand, letting it settle, frozen, between my fingers.

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Theresa likes to write about matters of self-inflection and personal experiences. She likes to write about matters of an out-of body, out-of-mind state, as well as subjects of an idyllic, pagan nature and the occult. Theresa writes horror, as well as concrete gritty and realistic dramas. Theresa is said to be witch and a poet. (within the horror writing community).