This famous version of The Nutcracker starring Gelsey and Baryshnikov was filmed five years before we met and seven years before our ill-fated association. It remains, to my mind, the most beautiful version of the Christmas classic ever recorded.

I’m not entirely sure why I have had an inner urging for several weeks, now, to post this poem, but I have, and since it revolves around the self-reflective mindset that results in what we loosely call “resolutions,” it seemed that today would be the day to post it.

First, though, a word about the environment in which it arose:

Perhaps you are one of those people who has never had a nadir – Ronald Reagan comes to mind, who seemed to live a charmed life throughout (until those last, difficult Alzheimer’s years, of course) – but I certainly did. The year was 1984 and both I and my world were a mess. That was the year our worst fears about the AIDS epidemic came true as my best and dearest friends started dying one right after the next, including two of the three Birmingham-Southern school chums who had shared their apartment with me as a launching pad when I first moved to the city (the third had quickly moved back to rural Alabama where he still holds forth); my job running the iconic and world-famous Harkness House for Ballet Arts on 75th Street came to an end as the funding founder had died and the school was closed; and worst of all, at the urging of my friend and first client, Gelsey Kirkland – whose now infamous cocaine addiction, unbeknownst to naive little me at the time, was then at it’s height – I had foolishly joined with her two mid-town accountants to start a ballet-management agency. (Her biographical account of these years is called “Dancing on My Grave,” if you’re interested, but she very graciously left me out of the book since, as she said, I was largely kept in the dark so I could honestly be the innocent front man. Sheesh!)

In other words, I was in over my head in just about every imaginable way when, one day, sitting at my enormous desk in our 5th Avenue offices, this poem poured out on the page. It rests upon two ideas: First, that we are ALL children of a loving Father God and, second, that He resides within each of us fully and resolutely, though we all-too-often fail to respond to His leading, to listen to His still, small voice, or even to accept His gift of infinite love.

Of course, once you hit bottom, there is at least a floor to push off against, and, as often happens, once these words were on the page, things began to turn around.

And so, on that note, may the new year be kind to each of you, and may we all resolve to listen more closely, in the coming year, to that loving Father Fragment each of us harbors within our hearts!

Frazzle-Dazzle

Frazzle-dazzle’s got my brain
Ablaze with causes,
Starts and pauses,
Assignations, obligations,
Integrations, designations,
Combinations of sensations,
Self-indulge-and-self-denials
Turning inches into miles.

Full of grandeur,
Full of face,
A wondrous bird
Without a place to land my being,
Cease my fleeing,
Free my flight of fancy-freeing,
Would that I would end the frazzle,
Be content without the dazzle,
Take my place, assume my space
With casual,
Elegant,
Masculine grace;
Be the king – however small –
Of all that falls within my call;
Place my subjects, my domain,
Ahead of thoughts
For selfish gain.

For Truth is mine –
By God, it is –
As my mind links direct to His.
Whatever goodness I command
Is but the shadow of His hand
At work behind these frightened eyes.

I pray that I, my God’s disguise
Can be with full humility;
That I, through Him,
Might better see
With Love’s clear light
Instead of dazzle,

Wisdom’s veil,
Instead of frazzle –
Designating assignations,
Integrating obligations.

If I would but recuse my self,
Leave ego to a dusty shelf,
Would then a king-in-truth emerge;
My trickle could become a surge;
Upon His platform might I stand
With miracles at my command…

But frazzle-dazzle’s
Got my brain
Ablaze…

© 2016 by George Thomas Wilson. All rights reserved.