By the time we’ve reached a certain point in our lives, most of us have accumulated one or more past experiences that haunt us or create obstacles to moving forward. They follow us around and linger on the edges of every new experience, trying to convince us that any parallels we see between past and present are fate lines that form a path from which we cannot escape.
Or, as poet Jeffrey Paul Bailey puts it in “Stunted Growth,” from his collection Speaks for Itself, “I get back on my feet / for another journey that ends / the way they all end / but in all this / the same lesson, never learned / is the one once more / I’m supposed to repeat.” Indeed, “The past is just as palpable / embedded in the present.” (“Afraid of the Dark”). It is the power of those experiences, both past and present, that drive this slim volume of verse through its study of self, the other and the world.
Sometimes the experiences stem all the way back to childhood and the injuries of upbringing, as in the poem “No Love Lost,” addressed to the narrator’s mother: “You said you needed to evolve. / You saw nothing changing / and as your illness progressed / you were the tight harness on our family / putting our will to bear it to the test.” Manipulation and control are themes that repeat in later experiences, such as in the masterfully executed “Leash (Emasculate),” which compares the narrator’s relationship with his lover to a dog and its master: “You’d pull that leash way too tight / as if it were to choke my neck / where no one could identify / any baubles or tags with my name / to show I was kept.”
Other times, past experiences harden into the battle scars of mistakes made, whether they be of choice or judgment, and the regret and guilt that follow. “Moving forward requires a lobotomy / If we are the sum of our experiences … / I’m merely an afterthought plagued at different times for / unverifiable absolution / For sins / past, present / or future.” (“Artificial Faith”)
Perhaps most haunting of all experiences are the ones that arise from patterns of indifference, ambivalence or passivity: “Too easily led by the nose / My inertia let them know / I could accept the status-quo / and that I’d be content living alone / yet they were all too content / I had nowhere to go.” (“Mama Said Make Friends”) Or as described in “The World”: “I’m adrift in whatever – / this resigned uncertainty is / all I can do is wait / for whatever comes my way.”
Many of the poems in Speaks for Itself seem to retread the same experiences from different angles, each reflecting on a specific aspect, as if teasing apart a knot of complex emotions into its component strands — with each of the strands leading to epiphany or despair or both. Bailey has arranged his collection so that such links between poems are allowed to surface.
While the details of the narrator’s experiences remain vague, the poems build upon each other in such a way as to add depth to the themes inherent throughout: abandonment and isolation, frustrated lust and unrequited love, truth and deception, purpose and passivity, dreams and obstacles. Among the strongest poems in the collection are the previously mentioned “Leash (Emasculate),” the adolescent sexual awakening of “Neighbor,” the refreshingly playful “Old Crows,” and the apt observations of internet culture in “Machine Madness.”
Whether playing with familiar turns of phrase or processing painful events through the lens of metaphor, each poem in Speaks for Itself indeed does just that, and in doing so, reveals layers of emotion and meaning through language and the alchemical power of poetry as a form. Ultimately, such poems leave us face to face with ourselves and inescapable truths. It is a healing process as much as it is one that reopens old wounds.
But examination and reflection are the keys to transcending the prison of our minds, and circumstance — eventually, inevitably — has a way of making such difficult work both urgent and necessary. It is better by far to never reach that breaking point. As Bailey aptly puts it in “Silence by Proxy,” “I don’t want to run / until I can’t / because it hurts.”
