What Kind of Person Does That?

Hi! This year (2022), I've decided to share a poem on my blog and podcast and read it aloud. It's all a part of my quest to be brave and apparently the things that I'm scared about still include:

1. My spoken voice
2. My raw poems.

Thanks for being here with me and cheering me on, and I hope that you can become braver this year, too!

What kind of person does that? A person person. What kind of person does that though, really? A person. That’s not an answer. That’s a nothing answer. It’s just an answer you don’t want to hear. If you know that, why’d you say it then? I didn’t know it until I said it. That’s how life works. We don’t know things. Look, the other day, my sister told me on the phone that she shakes after she has a colonoscopy. She’s old now and she’s had three. Every time she has one, she shakes and shakes when she gets home, almost collapses into bed. She’s fine the next morning. Her daughter’s a nurse administrator, and she told her that it was the anesthesia. But I think that’s not what’s happening. What do you think is happening? I think her body is remembering things she worked hard to forget. But why do people do that? At our dad’s funeral, a man showed up, and I heard her whispering to her husband the same thing I was whispering to my daughter, which was “Oh my God, why is he here?” We were talking with the same moan about the same man. Who was he? A man. Who really was he though? All his friends called him Uncle Hal, the kiddie’s pal. And he was at your dad’s funeral? They were friends. But why do people do that? Because the body remembers things the brain tries to forget. The moans become men become memory stuck inside of us, impacted, curled away. My sister hates having those procedures not just because they are invasive and it’s weird having people studying your rectum. She hates it the most because of the shaking afterwards. She told me that night that sometimes she worries it will never stop. I didn’t have the heart to tell her. Tell her what? That it never does.

Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in Carrie, so thank you for your support.

The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Eric Van der Westen and the track is called "A Feather" and off the album The Crown Lobster Trilogy.

While Carrie only posts poems weekly here, she has them (in written form) almost every other weekday over on Medium. You should check it out!

https://freemusicarchive.org/music/eric-van-der-westen/the-crown-lobster-trilogy-selection