I caught myself wondering this morning, at 45 years old,
post three 10lb baby boys created, built, buoyed and birthed through this body,
almost one year aprés radiation sickness zapping the shit out of tonsil cancer, no bum, no boobs, no breath, no boundaries
one month pre-first-5i50-triathlon, All re:, rebuild, restore, renew, reYes to this body, all mine.
Re-mine
Re-mind
it’s mine
With the scars
I’ve shed
of loneliness, harrowing calls for a fucking hand to grasp on to, curdling sobs of nothing, never, hating to ever ask why, with an empty belly of scraps for answers, lost in existential bullshit truthshit myshit – still lost
no,
I’m not
never have been.
Always found but too poetic to call out
found in the same place I came in.
If I was a dancer, I’d do
This.
I love the muscle, the discipline, the dance.
The ache of yearning to touch the unknowable
Throwing myself wild yet held, trusted, caught.
The throb of music speaking to me through me, threw me as me. In the construct of this body, my home for endless unforgiving beauty, relentless fire of scorching purple, passion, my touch down so tender with each flex, muscled palm, arch, heel
toe, pad pad pad
and fly.
I can fucking fly.
launch wide – out out out still more out
there
curve back, looking up, tumbling every which way my body contorts in partnership with the sky.
with him.
with her.
with them.
I surrender wide, full, brazen
glorious
knowing I am held.
That’s what I would be, if I was a dancer.
Thx to Patti Jo for posting this, it completely changed my morning. I didn’t know I was writing today, but clearly, I was.
xxT
TinaO is a writer, speaker and the founder of TinaOLife – a hub for all things worth living for, the workshop Live Your Best Story, and her coaching practice: Tall Poppy Living. She’s also a professional network marketer with a decade in the industry and with her Tall Poppy Living for Network Marketers Coaching Program, she teaches: selling isn’t slimey and marketing isn’t make-believe. You can be yourself and be successful in Direct Sales.
It was snowing in Vancouver the day you died. I was repainting my apartment, covering Mediterranean blue walls with layers of eggshell white paint. I was determined to work through the day and into the night until the job was done. I’d stopped to make lunch when the phone rang. It was Earl.
You need to go see Milton, Rodney. Ruby says he’s only got another day. Maybe two.
I thanked him and ended the call. I hurriedly showered scrubbing paint from my skin and hair. I ironed my clothes and quickly dressed. At the door I looked back into the apartment. The furniture and carpet were covered by white sheets, as if the falling snow had fallen inside the walls as well. The blue paint dark beneath the first coat of white was flowing water under ice too thin to walk on. I took the residential streets to the hospital. The black branches of the giant, leafless oaks arched above me like the charred roof of a burnout cathedral. I listened to the silence of the snowed-in streets as I walked to find some calm. The hallway to your room was wide, the bleached white floor shined like the full moon’s gaunt face on a winter’s night. The smell of human waste rose from canvas hampers filled with soiled bedding and gowns. Empty wheelchairs sagged askew by walls. I passed quiet rooms, the patients hidden in their beds behind beige curtains. I entered your room and sat by your bed to watch you sleep. It was as if someone had left a shrunken mask of the face I knew lying on the pillow. I held your hand. It was cold as the snow falling on the city. A nurse came into the room pushing a cart. She pulled a narrow table across your bed where she placed a tray and cutlery.
Would you like to feed him?
Sure. I replied
Milton! said the nurse loudly. Wake up. It’s time for lunch.
You stared at the nurse. Ruby? you asked.
She’s coming later Milton. You have a visitor. The nurse pointed to me.
Where’s Ruby? you asked me.
She’s coming later Milton.
Who are you?
I’m Rodney.
Rodney’s going to help you eat your lunch.
He likes the applesauce. said the nurse as she took the cart and pushed it from the room.
You tried to lift your head from the bed, but fell back on the pillow. Your hands grasped the railings, but still you were too weak to lift yourself. You kept saying
No, I won’t! No, no, I won’t!
I leaned my face in front of yours. Milton! Hi!
Your eyes found me and you grinned. Milt, It’s Rodney.
Hey Rod.
Are you hungry? Can I give you some food?
Okay. you replied watching me.
I picked up a spoon and dipped it in the applesauce and moved it to your mouth. You closed your dry lips around it and swallowed. Those apples are good! Your eyes shined like polished fruit as the boy took your voice.
I fed you several times and after each you asked for more until you shut your eyes. I stayed another hour, holding your hand as you slept. When I first got sober you’d drop me off at the small room I called home, saying before I left your car
You’re alright babe. You just don’t know it yet.
Rodney DeCroois a songwriter, poet and playwright. He has released 6 full-length albums, an album of poetry set to music (Allegheny), a book of poetry (Allegheny, BC) and a theatre production (Stupid Boy in an Ugly Town) that received critical acclaim at several Canadian fringe and writers festivals. DeCroo wrestles with regret, loss, aging, love, memory, death, art—always with his own ongoing recovery embedded in the background. DeCroo’s album and performances draw upon his greatest natural resource—his poetry.
Rodney DeCroois a songwriter, poet and playwright. He has released 6 full-length albums, an album of poetry set to music (Allegheny), a book of poetry (Allegheny, BC) and a theatre production (Stupid Boy in an Ugly Town) that received critical acclaim at several Canadian fringe and writers festivals. DeCroo wrestles with regret, loss, aging, love, memory, death, art—always with his own ongoing recovery embedded in the background. DeCroo’s album and performances draw upon his greatest natural resource—his poetry.
TinaOLife is pleased to announce that Singer, Songwriter, Poet, Actor, Storyteller and Artist Rodney DeCroo will be bringing his passion for living to TinaOLife – and it ain’t what you’re expecting, well, that is at least if you don’t know him.
If you don’t know him – you’re thinking “awesome a life-affirming artist here to breathe sunshine, rainbows and possibility into my days! I’m in!”
And if you do know him, then the truth is you don’t know what’s coming.
You’ll likely expect the grit, the underbelly, the fuck yous, the tenderness, the weeping wildness of his mind, the raw claws of his heartache, and the silliness of those smirking lips of his. You’ll expect his artistic genius. Okay, I’m bias (it’s true, I totally am. The guy wrote poetry about me) – I dated him many moons ago when we were college activists (me by experiment, him on purpose) and I became enamored by his thread-bare army jacket, cowboy boots and his love for Jack Kerouac, Alan Ginsberg and Pablo Neruda. Somehow this kinda square gal hooked up with this firey student union leader and then camped out with him and forty or so others students on the floor of then Premier Mike Harcourt‘s local office for ten days to protest the cut in education funding and support the teacher’s strike. Like I said, it was a special time.
While romantic relationships can fizzle out, or in our story – blow up, what drew me to him in the first place almost 25 years ago (okay, besides his dashingly dark and mischievous good looks), was and is his sacred humanity.
Now what do I mean by that? Sacred humanity?
poets can see.
poets invite us to feel.
poets speak the language of art.
poets embody the spectrum of emotions through words, pauses, breath and in stillness.
Rodney touches all shades and that in itself celebrates life, as he gives words and expression to our sacred humanity.
Welcome Rodney. Here’s his bio taken from his personal website rodneydecroo.com
Rodney Decroo Rebecca Blissett Photo
BIO:
Burnt out by seven straight years of touring and recording five albums, Rodney DeCroo walked away from his band and his label after the release of 2010’s Queen Mary Trash. The double album he left behind—urgent, brash, ragged, full of spleen—now looks like a roadmap pointing to the emotional reckoning that lay ahead.
Five years later the contrast is staggering. For his return to the studio as a singer-songwriter, DeCroo has produced something as beautiful on the surface as a dusk-painted reflecting pool, as shadowy below as his own tumultuous psyche. The gap between his inner and outer life has always been slender, but Campfires on the Moon—his debut on new label Tonic Records—gives us DeCroo at his most intimate.
Between then and now, DeCroo devoted the years to therapy and healing as he stepped up a lifelong battle with PTSD. He also threw himself into a more immediately personal trinity of projects, yielding a spoken word album (Allegheny), book of poetry (Allegheny, BC), and a touring stage play (Stupid Boy in an Ugly Town) that expanded both his critical and popular appeal.
Suitably refreshed, DeCroo was ready to follow Queen Mary Trash. With former Convictions bandmate and stage collaborator Mark Haney on double bass, and long time friend Ida Nilsen contributing piano and vocals—DeCroo had been quietly amassing material with Nilsen in mind—DeCroo returned to Brian Barr’s Vancouver studio and produced a record that outstrips even 2008’s Mockingbird Bible for its ferocious vulnerability.
Gradually the album takes on an emotional force all its own, through its combination of quivering intimacy and DeCroo’s greatest natural resource—his poetry. As its 10 songs draw to a close, Haney throws a little discordant shade into “Ashes after Fire”, foreshadowing the envy that grips DeCroo as he visits some old friends at the Railway Club.
“They’re doing well,” he sighs, “their wellness never ends.” But there’s a deep irony at work. Breaking from a past in disarray, Campfires on the Moon strongly suggests that its author’s own wellness has well and truly begun.
Rodney’s pieces (in whatever form they show up) will be shared on Thursdays – the punctuation of the almost weekend. It’s the day past the madness of the middle but not yet into the surrender of a Friday night.
Thursday it is – that day of the week where endings are still beginning. His Thursday posts will fall under his heading of Stupid Boy in an Ugly Town, because underneath it all, in the lonely corners of our day we can all feel a little displaced you know? Yet here we are.
Want to know more about Rodney? Want to find out where he’s playing next? Want to pick up his album? Visit his site here.
Til Thursday…
xxT
TinaO is a writer, speaker and the founder of TinaOLife – a hub for all things worth living for, the workshop Live Your Best Story, and her coaching practice: Tall Poppy Living. She’s also a professional network marketer with a decade in the industry. She teaches: selling isn’t slimey and marketing isn’t make-believe. You can be yourself and be successful in Direct Sales.
