Arousal (Part II)

Awakenings born from explorations of Eloquence: The Conjuring Power of Words

Samantha Wallen
5 min readApr 28, 2024

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Photo by Javardh on Unsplash

ii.

While men light themselves on fire, I want to lick the moon.

I am afraid to say this. To say I am aroused by the situation of the world. Afraid because arousal has come to only mean, sexually stimulated. The full breadth of it’s meaning, nuance, and history is lost to our everyday use. Yet I’ve spent the last three days outside under the pink Scorpio Moon so full of myself, I could burst. Full of that which cannot be articulated. Like a swollen pause, I sit in a metal chair on my back deck staring at the full moon and the night sky unable to fathom the bombs, the midday massacres, the brain matter hurled in middle eastern sands and on the front lawns of university campuses here in the U.S. All of it like stars falling through me, burning streaks across the dark side of my distance, my dormancy, my complacency, my lack of understanding.

All I know how to do is swell up in the place between understanding and not understanding, the place between touch and no touch, hesitation and wild abandon, the place between something to say and not knowing what the hell to say, action and stasis, the place between this moment and what comes next.

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Samantha Wallen

Poet, writer, writing & book coach — Seeking to restore the soul of our world one word at a time…