Phew.

I've just finished the first draft--seventeen stanzas--of a poem about my mother and my head is pounding like John Henry's hammer. My friend suggested that I write it because, essentially, I hadn't done it yet, and I'd locked up so much of what we all went through then it is disabling me even now. She's right.
It'll need a few rhythm changes as I concentrated, over the two days I've been writing it, on getting the poem down rather than on making each line precise right there and then. But I won't be excising any of the thoughts that came out (some surprising, some distasteful), as I sat and wrote. "First thought, best thought." And the idea was to heal. Making the poem a kind of exorcism. If the thoughts arose, then they've been hiding in my brain these last ten years, manipulating and directing me to do the things I've done.
But I won't be posting the poem here even when it's finished, out of sensitivity to my mother and those who knew and loved her. Probably I'll make a chapbook of it. More information will appear here if I go that way.