Keith

Dev at 3 in what was then our new home.

I.

I'm leaving where I have lived for the last 18 years. Dev has gone to Hoboken, fallen in love, and I couldn't be more pleased. On my way out to get tape I needed to close some boxes, I stopped to talk with a neighbor, and I thought she said she was returning a rake to Keith.  When I asked her if that's what she meant, she looked at me and said, "You don't know?"

"Know what?"

"Keith died a few weeks ago."

Keith lived next door. He left behind a wife and a 15-year-old daughter.  I was stunned.

II.

The winter after Rob died, a UPS truck driver plowed down my mailbox and left it in pieces.  When I saw what had happened, I felt like crying. I had been holding so many disparate parts of my life together and this insult was just too much.

I said to Dev, "there's only so many things we can fix. Leave it alone and we'll figure it out tomorrow."   Neither of us had any idea how to put it back together. I imagined all day how I would not be getting mail. I fretted and wondered what to do.  After great loss, the body mostly knows paralysis. Even small decisions can be troublesome.

When I got home that night from work, Keith was at the mailbox.  He had just finished assembling it. It has never fallen again.

That's who he was. Quiet. Kind. Watchful.

III.

I've been away from the house a good deal since it was put on the market and now sold.

Four years ago, Rob was still living. He had just been released from the hospital and was cleared for chemo after battling a staph infection he had gotten when a surgeon placed a filthy port into his chest 7 weeks earlier.  Two weeks from now he would suffer heart trauma and undergo thoracic surgery to remove an abscess the staph infection, followed by chemo, had caused. Hours after learning of Keith's death, I was reminded of the sharp pain that never quite heals.

Loss is never far away, even when I think I have tucked it well under my skin.  I imagine most women who have lost their husbands know some of what my neighbor now faces.  I brought a card over to the house and rang the bell. I could hear the dogs barking and the soft sounds of those at home. I wasn't too surprised that the door remained closed. 

After the first shock wears off, facing life is often too hard. I placed the card in her mailbox and left.

IV.

I wish I was wiser. I wish I had the power to heal with just a word or two and I could say or write something here that would ball up  the immense pain my neighbor, Tracy and her daughter, Natalie must feel. But I know that it asking the impossible and the dangerous. Grief works itself out of a body across years. It's patterned and idiosyncratic.  I see that now. 

The pulse to live is biologically strong. It carries the wounded along until we can find our feet and stand once again. Wobbly knees and all that.

V.

Two things mattered most to me after Rob's death and the years that followed.

Art I made after Rib died from his notebooks,

The first was love. My Devon had just turned 17 a few weeks before his dad died. The love I have for Devon kept me strong and vulnerable.  I did not know I would need both.  I did not know in the months after Rob's death that Devon and I would have to break and fall apart. 

We did.  Where there had never been distance--distance grew. Where there had been trust, trust frayed. Yeat's poem about how the center cannot hold was too true.  We had to break to become whole again.

The second was the knowledge that I have been so well loved by Rob. Distance has a way of reframing the ordinary.  It has allowed me to live brilliantly as he asked, and not live in response to fear.  And lord knows there are so many fears that arose alongside the loss.


VI.

"I don't understand it," says Dawn. "I don't understand why good men die early."
I tell her what Jane told me 2 years ago. "You're never going to understand that. That's what acceptance is.  Accepting what you can't understand."

If you find a quiet moment in the next few days, offer a prayer or two for my neighbor and her young daughter that they may find solace in one another.

Then go and live boldly. 
Live brilliantly.
Live.

Oh, Earth

“And Full of Sleep” (M.A. Reilly)

I opened an email and read a new comment about a post written several years ago about art, affinity groups, and brick-based learning. As I reread the post I thought about how committed I was to making art and frankly how happy I was. I don’t recall being anything but happy in those days. I wrote that I was richer than Midas.

I only noticed the date of publication after I finished rereading and realized that a year later we would celebrate Rob’s last birthday. I could almost imagine the specifics of the day when I wrote the post. More than likely we had celebrated my birthday and Rob’s the night before. Proabaly a simple supper, some presents, and surely cake. We were born a day apart. I imagine as I wrote on my laptop that he was somewhere in the house reading the latest issue of The Nation or a novel and Dev was likely on line with friends from Virginia or Europe. We probably had tea later that night and Rob may have even read the post by then. He always read what I wrote and would have offered his thoughts.

A year later he would be diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer, could no longer walk, would have spent 50 days in two hospitals and had suffered through three surgeries, losing a rib in the last one. He would spend another 50 days in the hospital in January and February, and would die at home a month after Devon turned 17.

When I read the post written ten months prior to all that sickness and death, I marveled at the lightness and innocence that defined me and our home. Married to a man who I thought of as a soul mate, I had lived a charmed life. We loved our child, delighting in him in ways parents only do with one another, and for 13 years we had the best dog in the universe, our Golden Retriever, Max.

Reading about my past unsettles me. It’s like that moment in Our Town when Emily returns from the dead to witness an ordinary day in her life and she realizes that humans move through their lives barely, if at all, noticing one another.  I thought Rob and I would live with one another forever and boy did we have plans for the future. It’s not that I thought we would be immortal, but truthfully, I didn’t consider death. I was in my mid-fifties, and Rob was slightly older. We simply never dwelled in death.

The knowledge that in 14 months, the man who walked through life with such few cares would no longer be able to climb the single flight of stairs to our bedroom is chilling. Live brilliantly, he told me, just minutes after we learned the cancer was terminal. There are things I now know about life and the commitment made each day to not just breathe through it, but to live it boldly, presently, now. Ironically, the post was about the ways artist see.

Memory is part remembrance and part ache, colored by experience. The past is never just the past. We reinvent it with each new day of living.

#SOL18: Live

Painting I made after Rob’s death. I incorporated his writing into the work. 

“A beloved spiritual teacher once told me that I kept protecting myself from losses that had already happened.”  Geneen Roth, This Messy, Magnificent Life: A Field Guide, p. 15.

I.

I’m heading south. The sun has yet to rise and the sway of the double decker train might lull me to sleep at another time, but not this morning. I’m reading Geneen Roth’s new book when I find myself suddenly stopping to reread the line I quoted at the top of this post. Something in these words has pulled me from the shared universe of book and reader into this present moment. The words resonate for I too have attempted to safeguard myself from old pain.

The heart wants what it wants.

What the last two years have taught me about grief is that new pains arise. Or at least I used to think they were new. Now I’m less sure.

I want to think that the last vestiges of grief are signaled by an acceptance to give up self-protection and live knowing the very definition of living is so often some degree of pain. Living first meant contending with the multiple losses that accompany any one death.

II.

What might Rob make of my and Devon’s lives now?

A few days ago, Dev and I watched the recent Star Wars movie—the name escapes me. By my count this must be episode 8. Both Rob and Devon were fans of Star Wars and for the first time that I can recall I experience a sense of Rob as the film started. It was brief—perhaps a minute or so and quite understated, but nonetheless there was a shift in energy. I felt his presence—a shiny kindness that surrounded me. As the feeling dissipated I looked up and outside a back window—the same window I stared out of for the 19 days Rob had been home before he died—the reddest cardinal I have ever seen sat on a snow covered branch. It remained there for more than 5 minutes and finally I turned my eyes back to the movie.

III.

I thought moving on was the goal. Now I see that as more trap than movement. It’s not moving on after all. It’s living. Nothing more than that.

Live.

Live, brilliantly.

#SOL17: I will arise and go now

Forgetfulness (M.A. Reilly)

I.

From somewhere in the high heavens, the places I could not see, far beyond my gaze, there was a future floating down. I was alive, feet on the earth, so I could not outrun that future and slowly it covered me up.

There is, my dear friend, in the heart of every living being, the will to go on. 

- KAO KALIA YANG, Your Threads Have Come Undone: A Letter to a Grieving Husband

The words quoted here are from a letter, Kao Kalia Yang wrote to a stranger who was deep in grief. Her words are poetic, brave, fierce, and so very, very right. I have been struggling to understand what it is I have mostly learned these last two years and it is the unquestionable understanding that the will to live is an untamed pulse.  Something fundamental urges adherence to living when the self is less sure of breath. 

At first I didn't feel. Shock insulates, slows the blood. Then I resurfaced and forgot. Each step in the day was a moment to anticipate Rob. I surfaced and remembered and it hurt in ways that defy language. When light began to creep in, to sink below the shut eyes of doubt it was largely because of the company I kept. Awakening happened alongside others deep in their own bereavement--mostly women I met in grief circles. In time I shared and shouldered sorrow and joy, and these connections rerooted me to the planet, to earth. I was feet to the soil. 

A day or two ago, a friend, Sandy, commented on a set of images I have been making this summer.  The presence of blackbirds can be found in so many of my paintings and truthfully I had no reason I could name as to why their presence in each painting was so prominent. She told me what I simply had not seen:

Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life

Birds in Flight (M.a. Reilly, 2017)

You were only waiting for this moment to arise 

- The Beatles

II. 

What now feels like a million years ago, though it was just the summer of 1990, Rob and I traveled north of Sligo to visit Innisfree. There we were rowed across the lake to the island and spent the day in Yeats' bee-loud glade. Born there was the promise of something permanent and something also fleeting.

I will arise and go now.

 And I am.

#SOL17: Waking Up

Forgive Yourself (M.A. Reilly, 6.3.17)

Have I been sleeping?

I've been so still 

Afraid of crumbling 

     - Melissa Etheridge

I.

I did not know I was sleeping awake--walking through the days and months after Rob's death with eyes open wide, and yet, somehow blind. At such times, sadness is more buoy than anchor. It keeps afloat the body that has little direction it can name or know. It gives meaning to the march of days and nights that follow the death helping to soften that slow trickle of time by the waning and waxing of tears.  At first trepidation creeped into my steps and living felt more tenuous than not. The simplest decisions felt too overwhelming to make.

These first year was marked by getting through, crying less, feeling more, and eventually beginning to notice the world beyond my immediate reach still pulsed with life.


II.

Image I made in March.

For the last two months I have drawn, painted, collaged, or photographed a face each day as part of a 100-Day Challenge. I wonder about my choice of subject. What exactly is it that I needed to learn?

Was it simply a matter of learning to draw parts: mouths, eyes, ears, noses, the line of the jaw as I first told myself?  Or was it more complicated?

Was I trying to relearn the curve of my own face? To know how the tremble of lips does give way to the lightening of eyes?  Each time I dropped white paint into the iris of an eye, I animated that image. Was this process a means to also animate myself?

Possibility is not an external matter--a Holy Grail to seek. Rather, hope and possibility are rekindled within and among others.


III.

My son recently told me to stop feeling sorry for myself. I bristled at his words and initially felt even sorrier for myself until this too felt burdensome and I stopped. Years ago a therapist I was seeing gave me a directive I did not want to do. I quickly asked, How will I ever do that?

He didn't answer me at first. Rather he asked me to lift one of my feet off of the carpet and I did.

"Like that," he told me.

Like that.

It is not that I haven't been busy. I have. But beneath these activities, I have been a body waiting. A woman waiting for something to change.


IV.

How do you move through grief?  How do you separate grief from a body?
Lift your heart off of the floor. Secure it where it has always belonged, and move on, knowing grief will follow, but it will not lead.


V.

It was Edward Said who wisely told us that we are well past a beginning before we can name it. The distance between Rob's illness and death, the aftermath, and now is measurable--allowing me to see my husband's life and death, and the continuation of my life, my son's life--here, now.

There is hope and possibility these days and I cannot locate a single event that marked this transformation as fact for there is no single event, no shining moment. As I mourned, life around me continued and I slowly tested welcoming the roar and press of living with tender hands--so often supported by others.

This life, I call my own, is what I make. It is so often about what we make, alone and with others. Sometimes it is that complicated and that simple. 

#SOL17: Waxing Crescent Moon

Crescent (M.A. Reilly, Rockport, Maine, November, 2012)

I.

Earlier last week, I removed the ring that Rob had placed on my finger all those decades ago. It was done with far less ceremony than when we first married. I removed it without hesitation. Sometimes you just know when it is right. And I knew without question that Rob was gone forever.

There's death, it's aftermath, and then there are those singular events that profoundly show what has been known, yet not truly felt.

My husband is dead. I am not.
Life pulses on.

II.

The months between Rob's death and now, have revealed a new understanding of what it means to be a parent. No longer can I turn my body into Rob's and seek answers through touch. No longer can I pass parenting to Rob, knowing he will care for Dev. Now, the joys and challenges of being the only parent are all mine.

Some days it's lonely here without Rob--other days, less so.


III.

After a week, an imprint of my wedding band remains. For years I have been wearing that slender bend of a waxing crescent moon wrapped tightly around my finger.

Now, that young moon is gone and only the pale glow remains. 

#SOL 17: Live Small

Rob making photographs in Ireland, near Mullaghmore.

The more still, more patient and more open we are when we are sad, so much the deeper and so much the more unswervingly does the new go into us, so much the better do we make it ours, so much the more will it be our destiny, and when on some later day it “happens” (that is, steps forth out of us to others), we shall feel in our inmost selves akin and near to it. And that is necessary. It is necessary — and toward this our development will move gradually — that nothing strange should befall us, but only that which has long belonged to us.  Rilke, August 12,1904

What belongs to you? What does sadness help you to know? What newness do you learn to name? A year of grief, after 6 frantic months of hospitals, infections, and cancer offered me both the bitter and the sweet. First fighting for, and then watching my husband die cleared from me any false obligations I thought I owed the world.  Perhaps you know these dilemmas and truths as well? 

What now belongs, what I now wear like new skin is the understanding that this wild, sweet life is most often informed by the choices made, loved, avoided, botched, and feared. What is central, though, is the understanding that I am not being acted upon.  

I am acting. 
Actor in residence.

My life rests in my hands, like yours has always rested in your hands. Even when I long for Rob (which is daily)--long for the life we were making together, I know that responsibility for my life is mine. It always has been even in the thick comfort of marriage when I would forget this. A fine marriage offers love and the illusion that responsibility for life is shared and does so with a sweetness no other relationship can mirror. 

So this life is mine and it begs the question, what will I do with it? What am I doing with it?  I think here of the poem, The Summer Day, by Mary Oliver when she asks us, "Tell me, what is it you plan to do/with your one wild and precious life." 

Live deliberately.
Remain curious.
Find the measure of my breath in the things I love.
Avoid feeling sorry for myself.
Live small.
Live brilliantly.
Be present.

This loss, this deep grief has helped to know that I have been and am loved in ways that cannot be measured. 

#SOL16: Westward Towards Solid Ground

OBX (M.A. Reilly, iPhone, 8/2016)

“Forever is composed of nows.”  - Emily Dickinson

I.

This past week I have written blog posts while seated in an Adirondack chair on a screened porch a hundred feet from where land meets ocean. Sand, bluffs and sea oats fill the space between the Atlantic and me. To spend a week on a barrier island is to know that beneath the relative sameness of daily life, changes are happening. Waves, currents, and tides change the shoreline, exposing and concealing shore. All week the wind has been from the North--so strong that regardless of heat and humidity, I have been cool on this screened porch be it morning, noon, or night.

Yesterday, I wrote off and on for more than 4 hours crafting a lengthy post.  Automatic saving happens without my effort and at 5:30 last night the file was updated. I had just previewed the post and went back to make a change. When I selected the preview button again, the strangest thing happened.  Everything I had written had disappeared except a few lines from the beginning of the post and a bit of recorded conversation.

Everything else, nearly 4 hours of writing, was simply gone--as if it had not existed. Nothing I did restored what I had written.

II.

The night before, I stood outside on a deck for a couple of hours talking with Susie, Jane's sister who is no stranger to grief. We stood side by side watching the Atlantic darken.  Behind us in the house, 15 others were getting ready for dinner. Susie has traveled a far more arduous path than I ever could imagine and I was surprised when she asked me, "Have you experienced any electrical failures since Rob died?"

"I don't think so," I began all the while knowing something was tugging at my memory. "Well, there are the landline phones. None seem to work anymore. Regardless of the phone I pick up, within a few minutes it stops working. I just figured the phones no longer were holding a charge. It is strange though as none seem to actually work. These failures are fairly recent."

"Electrical outings are common. After J. died, my phone rang and I heard, Mom, Mom before the phone stopped working.  It was his voice. You may want to pay attention to signs."

III.

Signs abound.
Naming does not.

IV.

The barrier islands off the coast of North Carolina are constantly eroding and reforming being reshaped by rising sea levels, shifting sands, and high-energy storms.  Left to their own, these islands would migrate west--towards land.

But that isn't happening.

Given the acute tourism interest in these islands the natural erosion of the ocean side and land growth of the sound side have been thwarted by human modifications such as human-made dunes, sandbags, sea walls, and beach nourishment. Walking along the beaches here, I am reminded that change happens both gradually and quite suddenly, regardless of our attempts to thwart such progress.

Like the barrier island I have been staying on, foreground and background tend to shift, obscuring what is most necessary.

We sometimes see what we think we most want.

I walk the beach and I think that regardless of tourist dollars, these barrier islands are temporary.  

V.

In between the writing I have been doing (and losing) I also have been reading Henri Nouwen's The Inner Voice of Love. I was stopped by his writing several times, especially when I read, 

"...you must go into the place of your pain, but only when you have gained some new ground" (p. 26).  

For the last year, I've been building new ground to stand on, acquired in part by the insights that have arisen alongside the talking, listening, reading, writing, painting, and walking I have done. With each post I have penned here, each mile logged, each art journal entry--a revised knowledge about sorrow and resilience; living and being has emerged. Some of these new understandings have yielded new emotional ground where I can stand as I peered into pain that has been more amorphous than not.

The goal here is not to build, but to stand still, lean in and learn, and then move on.

Gaining new ground may seem like an odd bit of figurative language. Yet to grieve is to attain incremental acquisition of solid emotional earth--footholds that help me to climb from where I have been to where I am now. This is record making.

VI.

In early June after the shock of Rob's death waned a bit, I thought about the previous ten months and realized that I had not died from feeling the bare loneliness of loss. I had not died from missing my husband more than I missed myself. I had not died when I was swamped by memories and reminders of the man I had lost. Instead I lived.

Grief is part erosion and part growth.

VII.

Since March, I have traveled more than 10,000 miles. I have been on hiatus from living the unplanned life before me.

Since January I have written 200 posts, most of these have been examinations of grief and loss and reclaiming life again.  I have filled more than three large art journals.

And this traveling through air and land and paint and pen has been good and necessary.

Living is part distraction and part invention.


VIII.

Yesterday afternoon, as evening was coming on, I closed the top of my laptop and though I was disappointed that I had lost the writing, I was not upset. What I mostly felt was relief. Yes, relief.

And I wondered, after talking with Susie about electrical outings and signs if Rob might have had a hand in helping me lose what I suspect needed to be lost. It almost seemed as if he was telling me, Mary Ann, Get back to living. It's time for you to move on. Carpe diem.

And so I followed my feet.

IX.

I put away the computer and walked upstairs to join the others for a glass of wine before dinner. I felt raw and exposed.  I was drawn outside with Jane and we climbed the steep stairs to the small widow's walk that tops the house.

Dense cloud formations gathered off the horizon as the sun's reflection on the waves began to wane. Behind us the sun slowly settled over the bay while before us the ocean gradually darkened. It was as if the darkness gathered closer points of light as the horizon line was erased.

We climbed down the stairs and joined the others for dinner and later I played some bridge and I did all of this as Mary Ann, not Mary Ann who lost her husband this year.

And that felt like breathing solidly, hearing my heart say my name--a name I misplaced a year ago.

#SOL16:LIVE

Maine, (M.A Reilly, 2011)

All morning I have been waiting for that unsettled-sick stomach feeling to arrive.  Imagine if you somehow swallowed a large pit, like the size of an ostrich egg that filled your stomach to stretching. Now add the acid normally used to digest food and that would just about capture the feeling. It's a feeling of terror, of strident fear, but here's the catch today there is no need for fear. A year ago that was not the case. Fear swamped me and for good reason. Rob had been diagnosed with cancer. 

Today, though, that diagnosis is no longer real and I can be happy. Yes, Rob has died. And that sorrow stays with me, but the fear need not remain, nor do I have to wait for it. 

I have dreaded today and I realize it is always up to me to determine what I make of it. My husband would want me and his son to be happy. I want us each to be happy. In a few hours we'll be at the beach. Yes, we will miss Rob, but that too does not need to be tinged only with sorrow. 

A friend tells the story after her partner died a friend shook her and said, "You didn't die." Those are words to remember, to live by. 

Live brilliantly, Rob told me. 
The first word is live. 

#SOL16: Reinvent

Walking the Dog (M.A. Reilly, Teaneck, NJ, 2013)

I.

What hurts so much after Rob's death is that I still desire the life I had with him. I keep seeking it out. I book a trip and mostly what I think about is how lonely I will be without Rob. I order dinner from a favorite restaurant and when the food I arrives I notice I have ordered an extra dish--Rob's favorite.  I see a new book by Walter Benjamin is being published and I buy it--a book Rob would certainly have wanted.

But Rob is dead.
Our life is not traceable. Nor can it be recovered.

Nonetheless,  I attempt to find trails into the familiar, the tender, the known. I so want to be with the man I have loved for what feels like my whole life and anything less leaves me feeling empty.

What I want most, I cannot have.
I cannot have.
Cannot have.

All around me this knowledge presses and in that compressed space where my very breath is labored, I understand I must reinvent my life.
Reinvent my life.
Stop looking for substitutes and live.


II.

Years ago I was in psychotherapy when the therapist offered a bit of advice--something he did only once in a decade. At the time, I kept repeating a behavior that was not only unhelpful, but also potentially harmful. This had gone on for months and I was feeling frustrated, frightened, lost.

How can I change it? I asked in earnest.

The late day light played in the space between us. He stared for a moment before saying, Lift your foot.

I laughed a bit and then I lifted my right foot off the carpet, paused, and then returned it before looking at him.

He waited, looking somewhat pleased before he said quietly, That's how you do it.

III.

After learning he had but a few weeks to love, Rob held my hand, looked me in the eyes and said, Live brilliantly. Don't you dare hide yourself away. Live brilliantly.

Live. Brilliantly.
How?

Just do it.

Displaced: The Will to Live

Displaced (M.A. Reilly, 2014)

And I dreamed I was flyingAnd high above my eyes could clearly seeThe Statue of LibertySailing away to seaAnd I dreamed I was flying

                              - Paul Simon 

I.

Watching my husband these last 3 months has taught me a thing or two about fighting for your life. As many of you know, Rob was diagnosed towards the end of August with Stage 4 lung cancer. He just spent the last two weeks in the hospital after having surgery to clean an abscess from his chest caused by a staph infection. He's spent nearly 30 out of the last 90 days in the hospital. Throughout this he has remained grateful for the quality and consistency of care he has received from doctors and nurses, family and friends.  Alongside this horrific illness there have been countless lessons about love--gestures so sweet they bring tears. And it is love that most fuels my husband's commitment to do what must be done in order to live.

Love fuels. Fear debilitates.

II.

I think about Rob's drive for life in light of the horrible decisions that politicians, like the one from the state where I live, are making. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is being ridiculed for his callous and frankly irrational comment that the United States should not accept refugee orphans from Syria younger than five years old because they have no family here.  Christie asks, "How are we going to care for these folks?"

Really?

He adds he distrusts the current administration to vet the refugees and claims that the safety of you and me would be in jeopardy if Syrian refugees were admitted to the United States, even those who are orphaned babies.

Fear debilitates. Love fuels.

III.

Surely the governor has lost his way. For is there no one as innocent as an orphaned baby? Is the face of the orphan now the face to fear?  Our safety is not in jeopardy by refugees--be they 3 or 33. The good people from Syria are doing what we all would do--what I see my husband doing--fighting to live.  We must respect that and help, not turn away people who are in such need.

The knee-jerk reaction of Republicans, like Christie, shames us all. and requires us to act--to send our elected politicians that turning away Syrian refugees is immoral, wrong.

Love fuels. Fear debilitates.

Poetry Break: Roll the Dice by Charles Bukowski

Surfaced (M.A. Reilly, Tuscany, 2009)

roll the dice


- Charles Bukowski



if you're going to try, go all the
way.
otherwise, don't even start.

if you're going to try, go all the
way.
this could mean losing girlfriends,
wives, relatives, jobs and
maybe your mind.

go all the way.
it could mean not eating for 3 or 4 days.
it could mean freezing on a
park bench.
it could mean jail,
it could mean derision,
mockery,
isolation.
isolation is the gift,
all the others are a test of your
endurance, of
how much you really want to
do it.
and you'll do it
despite rejection and the worst odds
and it will be better than
anything else
you can imagine.

if you're going to try,
go all the way.
there is no other feeling like
that.
you will be alone with the gods
and the nights will flame with
fire.

do it, do it, do it.
do it.

all the way
all the way.

you will ride life straight to
perfect laughter, its
the only good fight
there is.




All The Way - a Charles Bukowski poem from Willem Martinot on Vimeo.

Link to Zen Pencil Comic version of the poem.