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The voice, the bell-yellow
voice of the sax plays on.
Under the mind like a layer
of canvas lie the brushes
and strokes, the arms and legs
of memory.  The arrival on the
skin of sound is the moment
of love.  The unfurling of
the pallette.

You say, listen, the wail of
breath on brass is mine.  No,
it is yours.  The voice, no
longer alone, even when
unaccompanied, falls from
the blues of evenings or the
reds of afternoons, approaches
with footprints in sand.  We
are castled in music, our
colors unfurled.

Our fingers on the keys.  We
see the archetype of design in
the sound of the sax, the
movement in the fabric of
stripes.  The sound’s colors
draw us to each other.
Listen.  The wail of breath
on brass is everywhere.
Listen.


101793
Writte
3d · 92
SISYPHUS
Write what I know?  I am pocked with
chunks of broken moments.
Bits fall to the ground, trip me.
The terrain of my youth is a
moonscape.  I know what I know in
the craters of this place.

Born on the darkside and thirsty, I was
cold.  I found the sun later when I
was tumbled out the door of my
Mother’s leaking house.  Her screams
had become tentacles of maniacal
music.  Or do not call it music for
if you heard it you would not dance.

I am old now.  The view from my landing
is filled with sunlight and children,
“There are children in the leaves,
laughing excitedly”.   (Eliot)
I am paused in this imagination on
occasion.

When she is quiet,
I sweep her under the porch
where she lies drunk and unlaughing.
I do not let her out.  Yet she
steers me.  Her corpse loud
in her ***** nightdress.  

The terrain of my old age is pitted
with the debris of this haunting.  She
unsings me, makes me lie in
craters from which I climb up
daily only to tumble back down,
to have to begin again
from the bottom each new **** day.

But I sing as I crawl. And
she does not like the sound of that

Caroline Shank
I just found this and printed ot on AP as a journal entry
Don't worry about reading this until there is time

Today is Thursday September 27, 2001

It was a warm night. July in the Midwest has evenings that sieve the  over you like a breath, sometimes too moist, but more often than not a whisper to be wanted. She was never disappointed in the evenings. Except this one. This one was so unexpected. This evening she didn’t feel the breeze or even remember to feel for it as she did so often. She liked the Midwest summers. The cold of winter that sliced through all the down jackets and sweaters were a long way off in July and she always deluded herself for a few months. No, not really.

Every May first she would say to her husband, “Winter’s coming”. He would always give her a hard time about that. Instead of looking at the beginning of summer as a celebration she always felt it was the beginning of the end. She really didn’t like the cold of winter and the only thing she could do through it was count the days until March 1. That was the Big Day for her. It meant the beginning of the end of the worst part of winter. If it snowed again it wouldn’t stay around long and the below zero wind chills wouldn’t probably happen again until next year. But the Midwest, especially Wisconsin was tricky. April and May could still be cold and wet.

There was a trip she and her husband took to Prairie du Chine for his May 10 birthday and it snowed in Milwaukee. What a ****** that was. So May could still be cold.

The exciting springs were when she could get out to tan as early as April. The feel of the warm sun on her skin and the air spinning softly over her body was the best feeling she had ever known and actually still is to this day. Not that on that July night she expected to ever have this day or any other.

Depression is exacerbated by the music of the 50’s and 60’s. Did you know that? If you are a boomer, depressed, and smoke a lot of cigarettes, drink a Lot of coffee, sweet and milky and wonderful that coffee is, and listen to enough Andy William’s, Jerry Vale, Jack Jones over and over I guarantee you will find yourself in pretty sad shape. When you are young yet, full of mistakes, and sure that life hasn’t a future you want, well whoops, trouble.

That’s the kicker. That future thing. You have had twenty odd years of futures that you watched over your whole life. Every year had it’s own future. When you were a kid and the other kids hated you, you could hear some voice, probably Catholic, telling you it would get better when you grew up. What if when you were a teenager and you knew love as ****, and drinking, and Really Bad choices? What did your future hold for you if you thought about it? What if your parents were so debilitated that your future looked like more of the same of that?

So then it’s July, a time of beautiful flowers. I have for many years now, in my fifties as I am at this time, believed that every flower is the face of an Angel, but when I was in my twenties I only subliminally understood this. July is when the lake is blue every day and covered with diamonds. I took a picture a few years ago of this. The blue lake in the background, a slab from the tunnel project in the foreground, they used these slabs all along the lakefront to help with the erosion problem. In front of this piece of concrete was a beautiful yellow flower. It remains one of “her” favorite flowers.

See I am changing pronouns here, which I promised myself I wouldn’t do. This is a story not autobiography, that vehicle often for the pitiful and beginning prose writers.

She is a poet and was even then. She wrote lots and lots and was just beginning to get a few things published in small literary magazines. She decided to go back to school. She really wanted to be able to talk to very bright people and hold her own. She knew she needed education. There was a whole school full of information and she loved the idea of exploring that. She loved the campus and the quest. She wanted that sooo much. But, alas, money wasn’t really available. She’d married young; she’d been very narcissistic all her life and didn’t realize she had to get a good job.

She had her babies. Her babies were the most amazing and wonderful beings. She sang to them every night. They grew up to the sound of her awful off key voice. But they did grow up listening to her.

That was debatable that night in July. She was going to die. You see her future was one of more bad choices and no way out of them. Her history, her personal history was written across her skin in the tan lines of the bikini she was still able to wear in her yard, but only in her yard, as the *** belly with the stretch marks of two close pregnancies were white even after the rest of her was tan.

She was full of rationalizations about “the kids”. At that moment they were “the kids”, but she knew they would be all right. “A million mothers die every day and their kids grew up okay”. Besides, this was about her. She was incapable of distinguishing her pain from anything else. Only the wretched who have traveled that path understand that. Panic was her master. She just didn’t know it was panic. It was many years later when the panic attacks hit that she knew what they were and got some kind of treatment. Oddly the same psychiatrist was able to help her then, with the panic attacks when she was in her fifties, the same psychiatrist that couldn’t help her that Wednesday night in July.

She was at the end of all her bad choices and lost opportunities. School had just begun. She was to take a midterm in her Anthropology 101 class the next morning. That didn’t matter. She knew she was going to get an A anyway. She knew the material inside and out. She loved this stuff so much she’d spent a long time, years, reading about this. Getting accepted into college was not easy. She graduated in the lower 10% of her graduating class from high school in 1965. More bad choices, but she really hated studying, hated everything about school except getting done with it. She had to graduate or her mother would be so humiliated, she would be humiliated too because in 1965 you had to have a high school diploma to get a job. She just wanted out of school then. She wanted to work in an office. The thought of further education was not possible. Not for her. Not for any of her friends although she dated mostly Notre Dame students, that was not for her grades. They liked her fun side shall we say. Some of them found her bright. Ace, whose name was Gary Heck, remains unforgettable as a force for her self-esteem. He really believed she was smart.

Namaste………………..


L
ake Michigan with diamonds and yellow flower










Thursday September 27, 2001 8:00 pm


There was one time she remembers with amazement and still a little humor. She was used to blind dates with Notre Dame students. She didn’t mind them. Her girlfriend ^^^ would usually fix her up with someone her boyfriend ^^^^^ knew. One of the fun things they did on Sunday afternoon’s was to go to the cemeteries around ND and look, (yea, right) for Knute Rockne’s grave. But she thought the fall afternoon’s in the quiet, cement-aged, leaf strewn place was pleasant and it was cheap. Notre Dame students had No Money, Ever. So one time she was fixed up with this freshman.

Whatever his name was is gone now but he was kind of cute. The car was packed. For once she wasn’t driving. Who was? Hell, who remembers? This guy was young, about a year older that she was. The other guys had beer of course and plied her with it. It was a riot to get her drunk. It was an ambition several of the males she knew aspired to. Oh well, she drank and got a lot of attention. This guy was really kind of shy. She knew she could bring out the fun side of him. She’d seen shy guys before and she had a knack with them. It was like making honey. She settled her personality over them and just squeezed. (She’d learned a lot since her youth in that rotten New York suburb) and found out how to be liked. Not *** exactly, but funny drunk kind of cuteness.

Well, this poor guy never did call her again. It seemed she overwhelmed him although he did seem to find her fun. Who was it that fixed her up with him? Hell, it was so long ago, and there were so many. But this was kind of mean. It seems this guy had just gotten out of a Catholic seminary and had never had a date before. She had no idea he was a social ******, but everyone else did and it was unanimous that the perfect person for this guy to break open his little piece of innocence was her. Oh boy. When she found this out she was flattered I think. ****, she would have been flattered by any attention that was evenly remotely fond. These people basically liked her and that was new and marvelous in her life.

And so it went on for a couple of years until she met * and found God at the same time and by twenty years and nine months old she was married. She was secure. She could stop working and be a vegetable. Which of course happened for a while. Poor *, he was sort of socked between the walls of his cells with her neurosis. But it seems he loved her. He still does for some reason.

This July night in question. July 10, 1974, she knew that there was no way to stop. No way in Hell she was ever going to not need attention. She was young, she was not pretty, but had nice legs and skirts were very short at the time. Very Short.

There was the time when she was eighteen and she and her friend @@@@@ were chaperoning dances for the local YMCA where @@@@@ worked. It was co-chaperoned by the local cops. There were a couple in particular who liked her a lot. One she was really nuts about. He drove a motorcycle at work and was pretty cool. But there was one who kept telling her he only came to the dances to watch her legs. He thought she had the most amazingly beautiful legs he had ever seen. So did a lot of people. She wasn’t pretty, but to some guys that wasn’t IT. She had little chest to appeal, her face was odd and quirky looking, her brown ratted hair was OK but she did have those dancer legs. And she loved to dance. When the skirts went up thigh high she was really in trouble. It was several years before she realized how much trouble.

So she left work that night, a filled thermos bottle of water, and a new prescription for Fiorinol in her purse and headed for the lake. She figured she wanted her last view of this life to be over the water.

Packed into the wooded hillside with her blanket she was like the last cigarette in the pack. She was utterly disposable and probably easily overlooked. She counted on that. She knew she needed time.

All those pills, then a last cigarette and then her “Babies” came into her head. Not “the kids” but her “babies”. Her sweet wonderful barely older than toddlers babies. NO. So she ran.

Namaste……………




May 2, 2006

I haven’t written in here in two years it seems. Or should I say “she” hasn’t written in here.

She was watching Oprah today and Terri Hatcher was on talking about her abuse and the results of that treatment. It is de rigueur these days to talk about our abuse and recovery. It occurred to her that “abuse” was the only thing she ever knew as acceptance. She craved abuse. The terrible part was when no one was abusing her. Then she knew she was trash, something to be left at the curb and picked up by the trucks with the rest of the garbage. She laid out herself in the paths of all the trashmen she could find, one after another.

It is no longer relevant what her mother taught her or didn’t teach her. She knew from her mother’s knee (or as Dr. Robin would put it her mother’s womb) that to be wanted, to be **** was the be all and end all of everything, even when her mother was calling her a *****, over and over again, it was still all I knew, all I understood. Her mother was crazy and out of control but still crying for her lost ****** self. Always to her death, drugged and calling for more and her mother.

She remembers telling her shrink of maybe 21 years that she was after all only trash. It seemed he really didn’t understand. That was a ****** only many years later, that part about him not understanding. He was a good man. He just wanted her to change her behaviour and didn’t feel like any kind of information about why she was the way she was, was at all relevant. So many lost hours, free, but essentially lost.

He had asked her when she was in Intensive Care that July afternoon after she had regained consciousness why she hadn’t called him. Frankly it never occurred to her. She just figured, she told him, that he would tell her to take 5 mgs of ****** and go back to work. He’d done that only the Sunday before the Wednesday that was to be the last day of her life. Crying she left work with her thermos and was off to the beach, perhaps to finally fertilize the ground beneath her blanket.

She had many years with this shrink. Years when just the knowledge that he was still setting her up with the next appointment that she clung to like a cat in heat clings to carpet and pulls herself along. He was my carpet and everyday I would get up and pull myself to my next appointment. Once a month. We would have pretzels from Auntie Anne’s in the mall, which I would bring along with coffee and literally shoot the **** for 45 minutes. He knew she wasn’t getting any help but he never left her. He never left her.

She was thinking today during the Oprah show that so many girls feel bad about themselves when they are abused. Not me. I felt bad about myself when the abuse stopped. It was through the abuse she found that “validation” that seemed to be the raison d’etre for her life.
She sought it, begged for it, cried for it, and panicked when it didn’t happen. When no one wanted to knead her and ply her and pull her to their own greedy selves that she felt like a failure. No, abuse was what she craved. Abuse was love, no abuse left her with only garbage to look at in the mirror.

She came running back to the one who trusted her and the two babies who were her only badges of anything resembling an attempt to do something that actually mattered. Her husband and children saved her as she crashed her car in her drug induced coma.

She got over it so slowly. She had two friends who walked her through the volumes of her narcissism and out the other end. She understands so much now. She understands, at last why *** is so awful and the trust is when the *** is not an issue. *** is the disease. *** is the end of life. It was coming back to trust that saved her that night. Running as fast as she could to the only person she knew who loved her and would save her.

Still does. Thank God!

1
It is with bonecrushing sadness
that i report the
     Loss.
The Life destroying
dangle on the
     rope
God provided.

Almost is a hateful
word.
Almost is the
rip on the
     Stick
of Hope.

What now do you want to
     Know?
The War served by the
     Friends of Allah
Praise to His name.

The escape to the West
     failed.
The Earthquake finished
    Our completeness
from happening.

Your Dream became
your

Ticket to Hell

And mine to the
Unmade bed
     empty of Time
and Pleasure

To the Days of our
     Lives
Never to be

Led.


Caroline Shank
April 23, 2025
Apr 16 · 163
Grief
Grief is a filled cloud,

vapor.
Limp.

  reaches

failed prisms.

are
easy when
night and day figures
debit
your

Balance.

my
Observation:
you

Gone.


Caroline Shank
April 15, 2025
Apr 6 · 92
Gaza Spring 2025
Soak in the bath of pain you
Who brought them

Crushing

its vocabulary of slander
to we with whom you wake
each day

severed limbs of children

Tongues lay spent

Cries To Allah from the
dying Faithful.  

God is good who pray
amidst the betrayed
lay slathered in the
fields of liars.

Who takes  away the good
of this world
while
we

pray

that the sons of betrayal
hang

Hearing  

bombs backfire.

Lives lost is a
dried sand sounds
of choking
down the

*****

Of lies whose brother
Truth

Is Betrayed.


Caroline Shank
April 4, 2025
Apr 2 · 79
Consequences
It has been so sickly
Written, so
slidlingly

Redundant

said

that one is born to
in
the night of

Souls.

The dark triggers the time,
the weather and the
style
of the

Agreement.

The  is a
familiar Address.

Shutters close and
the dressings

notes the time.

Midnight is a fools
Game.

Sleep
Dulls the material.

You are unlikely
to call for, Toast
to

Love.

I watch As stars
Rapel down

sliding,
you so
carefully

placed to keep
out
Songs and poems
that lure

these lonely thoughts
Slipping on
the tears

of your

Indifference.



Caroline Shank
April 2, 2025
Mar 30 · 82
To Wait
To wait

To wait is to be suspended
On a slender thought.

Not gossamer but iridescence's

Shines.

Your face in the morning

Wet

Slowly the question asks
will
you?

The days and years lie in
rubble

Tomorrow's dust
degenerates,

Yesterday's
bleed from the
pain of unuse.

To wait is a crowded cellar,
sour wines,

You and your
sapiosexual
5 th act.

It  is
Another dead end

itself that

staines the
floors of
Cellar

silences



Caroline Shank
March 30, 2025
Mar 26 · 231
Looking for Love
Does anyone know

Really

That the ends of life are….
Rattled with dried

Labors

Notes left to oneself
Be true
Good

Play dead.Suffer little children.
Tomorrow tomorrow tomorrow

Suffering into the light
Heal
The last time was so close.

I don't write what you want.

when I was young
Is a song.

I, however, a l …am a broken slab.
A well of  drenched
marinade.

You could save me

Yet…you

Fold my poetry over
Into

Daylight’s

Hampers.

Wherein I  lie.
Crimped
edges of a

Masterpiece


Caroline Shank
March 25, 2025
Mar 18 · 132
Ziggy
I was brilig in my slothy
days,
My combs dangled in the
fullness of ⁷time.

No particular fell but
were crushed.

I murmured to the sky's
yellow parts, home
of the slippery
curved words.

I walked the gel of
yesterday until &
therefore the ,,,,

Last lost number
was my age

A ziggy
On our

Love's shipped

trembling tune.

We

Kissed in the
fullness
and in the
ripeness

Of God's

Embrace.


Caroline Shank
MARCH 18, 20÷
Mar 17 · 190
A Tear in the Fabric
What is the sound of one
Love tearing, the sound of
one heart breaking?

The song of love lies
crying
into the wrinkle of sheets.

Sing with me!
songs in the fire,
sparks of crackle and sprawl
Crawl
to you,
~~.to the fields where
dreams are
children. Our

Oyʻoozed
monument

Pleas to God for

Yesterday


Caroline Shank
3.16.2025


..
Mar 14 · 65
Opinions
Look Around

The sky is melting  not falling
as has been

mentioned earlier.
Your notes are Incomplete.

Tomorrow the Ether will roll
out a tapestry of your life..
The colors are[

posies of opinions like chameleons

peering

into adolescent
Misunderstanding

standing In a corn field
looking around

Find a body and your
touch can

Spread the stain of

Un
Opinions applied with a
gravelled voice.

Shout  back…

“Blow it out your ***.”


Caroline Shank
March, 14, 2019
Mar 9 · 78
First light
It's early morning and I
spend this time of colors
brightening and sounds
resonating.

Of plans still shaking
off the dew which overnight
brought life to tomorrow.

You are
kisses reflected on my
waiting tears. With hugs
waiting in my arms

for you.

The Pleasure of this are the
moment radicalized.  I
will never let you go.

Parades of Angels
pass over me.  Send
your music.
.
Test me not too long
alone  Beauty is
Loves indulgence.
Time is

Layers against
Our bodies, warm with

Each other

Rainbowed


Caroline Shank
March 8  2025
..
Mar 4 · 167
At Midnight
'There is, at midnight, a swoosh,
a backward sound
unheard at 6 o'clock.
Time licks the moment,
the bells, the knock on
tomorrow.  

We amaze
as dawn asks for its
audience and our last
guesses fade into
today.  

Nascent trails
of memories rise and
fall

into the rescue mission
the sunlight brings on
feet of clod.

It will be a day of reaching
into the pocket of love
newly incarnate.  

You
receive me.

Caroline Shank
March 3, 2025
Mar 3 · 112
Blue
.C.'Blue is not my favorite
color.

Circles of sapphire
worn by /
11/lonely

women

Whose husband's memory
Failed with
yesterday's
sports scores.

Break my heart  with temptation.


I will love you no matter
what .


Caroline Shank
March 2. 2025
Feb 25 · 83
While You Sleep
It's the wanting you  
The wanting your mornings, and days each wi t h their
own nights .  The Syllables
of weeks each a territory
whose river's song, the blues
of which I lay me down
now to pray for tonight's voyage


Caroline Shank
February 24  2025
Feb 24 · 163
The Room
rooms are full.

There is time enough.

Time to move in.

I can see theeRo9m
other end of

tomorrow,

when the door to
you is open
and the end of time

itself.
beats


In your face. Your
blue eyes are
the
Signature
of our

Love.

We are emblazoned.

   Our existence,

in our faces reflect
on my own.

Our
blue eyes
move into

Tomorrow


Caroline Shank
February 22, 2025
Feb 18 · 75
Sorrow
The numbers of sin’z
scales written ,
of
her inequities is
like bells on
Christmas
morning.

Never silent She (I)

is
capable
of great

misunderstandings.

Tomorrow's multiplying
the rotations
around the

streetlamp.
Kids we were singing
And cLapping

Every time today is
crumpled.

Lights on the ground.

Not forever (me)
Again.

Sing a song of
Six
pence

inevitably.

And she died of
bleach.
Scrubbing Hands burn.

He left on a
weekday.

Today
when I was
Young.

Tomorrow and tomorrow
and tomorrow

was a play

after all.



Caroline Shank
2.18.2025
Feb 15 · 91
50 years
50 years


ago, full of the
Righteousness of God.

He

?
who held my place
while insanity

With torn dreams, the
miasmas of lost love.

Bless me Father
you who showed
the ways to Hell

Baptizet me
Again.

The midnight (sirens
are lapping.
I stumble from
the drink of happiness

spilled on the sands.

You whose conscious is
trifled with like the fish
on the line

I eat
my disappointment

cold


Caroline Shank
Valentine's Day
   2025



Caroline Shank
2.14..2025
Feb 15 · 31
Not Kind
I am not a kind person

At times
I trickle interest in what
you are saying.

Mostly
I wait for
noon on a hot
day.

The breath of a
thousand words
cannot reach

the craters of
stones dug
without care.

I am not a kind person.

Where you were,
dying,
it was
the nurses who
compassioned you.

My reflection was
hidden in the
still pool of your and

leaving brown eyes.

I reek with sadness,
with the
penance of being

alone.



Caroline Shank
10.8.2022
Feb 12 · 70
Remember Me
Remember Me

Light is falling through the
Sleeves of my longing.

That's pretty good.  You
take me into the grotte
of imagination.  You

Nudge me
And I grapple with the
silence of rhymes.

Long was the life
time spent in the

whorle of loving.

The verbs I write
at all in the shadow where
my desk rests on the
faux brick wall are quiet

against the window curtain.

And I breathe.

Not all poetry calls you to
me as Sara writes. It's
the literature of my life

as I walk alone on the
beach where we stood

and Kissed that last
Night

The waves off Sarasota
splashed against us

The gulls screeched.

Taps sounded in the
night’s wind..

And I am fragile. I
sleep late and stay
out of the sun.

You may remember my
face.  

My stumble.

The last morning of

the

World.


Caroline Shank
February 12, 2025
Feb 5 · 83
Whispers
Whispers

She whispers in his ear
of the love grown so long
out of the shelter.  

She says
how much she loves him.

He hears the
trumpets,

God's voice.



Caroline Shank
2.6.2025
Jan 29 · 70
Who Are You
Who are you to take my
Life
between
your drive to
change the landscape?

Do you unholy man seek to
save me? Are you constant
and believing in the Rightness

of your sanctimony?

For What is your Purpose?

You misunderstand my wrath.

Not in this world are you

Anymore

The mute destructive act
was not from caring sprung.

But

from the tongue you spit
Out

the ordinance

of my destruction.


Be out of my Poetry

Forever.

Forgotten



Caroline Shank
January 29, 2025
Jan 25 · 86
Reflection
I have pages of prayers.
assimilated.  I saw them
yesterday.
I've
Clipped them together
with a
yellow butterfly.

Some
I wrote myself.

On nights I would
sit reading, lonely.
Days there,
were~~ sounds

remembered,~~
of music
coming always
from a farther room.

I meditate.  I fly off
to places where we
made love long ago.

You were love's young
dream.  I, a reflection.
always,the Other
side, a mirror's
back.
~~
Unreflected.

Incomprehensible.

A dichotomy
interrupted.


Caroline Shank
January 25, 2025
Jan 21 · 305
Getting to You
Depression lurks, stalks.
My woods are deep to
hide these creatures
from

You.

I have no season.

No respite.

You will never know that
my life is not well lived.

I have you to bless my
days and none to bless
my nights.

Tomorrow's go away before
they reach me.  I'm am
eternally present.

My group would scold me.
All is only eternally

present.

Irrevocably trapped in
Unforgiveness,

I sluff off your kindness
as I am tired in the mud
of my conscious
observations.

You will risk nothing
in loving  me. I am
not there.

This poem is itself
Ungrateful, under
the sun of no light.

The paradox of your
love is to me

the vehicle that will
take me to you

fully  in love.


Caroline Shank
January 21, 2024
Jan 20 · 98
Journal entry 2013
Forgiveness (2013)


I learned as a young young girl that there are things that are unforgivable, things that are inconceivable, except that they happened.  I learned that
no one cares
whether or not you forgive them, or her, or him.  Forgiveness is a NON issue, actually.

Life moves on, with or without our sorrows or bitternesses.  It just moves on.  We go with it, unless we choose not to.  Should we choose the "absurd" path of going on with it, it still makes no difference whether or not we "forgive".

Forgiveness is for God, whatever your relationship is to God.  Our job is to reach through the minutes of our days and to be the best or kindest, or not. There is no choice but  to "fare forth".  The pain of abuse or insult rides with us.  It just does. It's where we go with it that makes us, breaks us, or takes us on our way.  We become our best idea of ourselves because we know the difference.  All learning is from analogy.  If someone hurts me, do I not bleed (etc.).  Do I not know how to BE in this world with kindnesses because I have known cruelty?  Of course I do.

I have known extraordinary kindness and love.  I have known these things when I have least deserved them.  I learned how to love from the amazing love which has been shown me.  I have known Gratitude and it is the Mantra of my life in my last act.

Deception, in whatever its form, cannot cut us, unless it matters so much we are willing to dwell in some mire of useless opinions.  What is important to me is contained in a really quite small circle.  "The rest is not my business."   T.S. Eliot.

It is irrelevant, this idea we have about "forgiveness".  It's arrogance in extremis.   If someone causes me pain I really cannot do anything about it except to remove the source of it.

I am, beyond belief sorry for the pain I have caused others.   All I can do is fall on my knees in gratitude that the next minute or hour has pushed me into the next minute or hour and if I hang onto God I will go into the next flowing parcel of time with wounds that are healing, with sores that, Thank God, show me the direction in which to go to find, again, a place of peace,
people who do love me and whom I love.  
I have lived to know many many Blessings and Gifts.  (If I had waited to feel "forgiven" I would still be mired in pain.  It is the gift of Acceptance, unconditional Acceptance which sustains me.)

Grace is not found in concepts like "forgiveness" but in the constant acts of love.

It is not my place to Judge.  God knows this.  He most surely does
Jan 20 · 118
The Lion Sleeps
Bored little girl so long ago.
Red Keds and a sailor's
hat.

The roses grew by the
door.  Mother
didn't notice the lacey

frill of their demise.

Or hers.  The summer
of the song was hot.

Lions.  Teenagers fit
full of ***** and
Kent cigarettes.

There she sits behind
the school gym.  The
player piano

accompanying

the tap tap of the
ash.

Fourteen was a sepsis.

Was, was.  Was.
A heartbeat of
dark nights, taunts

gone wild.

Memories in the mind
now so
Long
Ago.

She sits still, her
pleas for please

to let go.

To my 78th summer
wires of time twine

before the tunes
played

Long ago still
fresh as the summer
behind the empty

school.
Over and over.

Plagues are breathing
still

In the wrinkles of

My

Memory


Caroline Shank
January 19, 2025
Jan 17 · 63
Grace
Grace

is breathed.

Life sustained,

without asking.

Today is Thanks

For you

The last time I saw
you
in blue jeans

walk toward
me

The Dove of God

Arriving.

Saecula Saeculorum


Caroline Shank
1.17.2025
Jan 9 · 278
I Cry
I Cry

I cry for the new babies.  They
havA thrill for living.

From so small hands the
DAY is channeld.
Tomorrow has not

Yet

determined  the posture
of tomorrow

Tomorrow that will suffer
of Blue Skies and questions.
Long after the rules are

set like spoons
to drunken rules.

I cry for tomorrows
hidden like doors
the feral cats use


No work of small hands
can stop the

Guns.


Caroline Shank
January 9, 2025
Jan 9 · 68
Tell Me
Tell me


again about flush toilets and hot
water.

I want you to keep it up,  I
sit and sit and “think about

it.
How good my life is.
.
Tell Me stuff of legends.
How God is good.

How love is to one's soul
as rain helps the Garden
    Grow.

Beat It into my failing
feeling.  The heart is
only prescribed to the



Foolish.

Tell Me Again


Tell me to stop weakening
with each flash of you.
Each belly flop of

your caring.

My turn at sublimation
leaves tears on my vocabulary.

To be Wise for you  is to be
as the lonely clef

under songs.

Daylight drives me cold
into

the
Lonely

Night


Caroline Shank
January 9, 2025
Jan 8 · 86
Where Have You Gone
My friend is gone,a way of
leaving, mirrors October.
    
A warning salvo is flat footed

against the failure to bond,
     A Bottle slips.

The Brandy puddles.

Where have all my

  flowers

gone?  Never a breath, never
a sigh even.

My Old is withered.
to wrong turns.
  To those who read
the magazines.

I persevere
the unwritten
untold.

There is Now.

The failure of laughter
at my expense.

I cry unheard.

The Silence.


.
Caroline Shank
January 8. 2025!


~~
Jan 5 · 275
Phantasy
She tripped over you in a
final wave of surrender.

You said
   meet me where

The white cloth waves

in the air,
today's laundry.

Time's stretch limp

       unworn

clock’s hands.

Future stopped in the
U.nticking

The lie in bleach is

rinsed .

Love lives in the

shadow....

Tomorrow.will be
a
      concept

w.rapped in a

fantasy.


Caroline Shank
January 4, 2025
Dec 2024 · 95
Not for sale
Caroline Shank Dec 2024
Mother did you know I would
grow old alone?

That the crevices on my
face fell into the street

with used syllables?

Tomorrow you said
No
To my first boyfriend.

Mother did you know I
wouldn't care. Your scarred

breast
was not my fault.

The trail of your
Epithet does not hurt
As much as this

Old age
When you
tried to

sell me


Caroline Shank
12.24.2024
Dec 2024 · 112
My Love
Caroline Shank Dec 2024
You asked me if I had
     Written
a poem today?

No I said.  You could not
have known that you are

     my poem.

My metaphors have changed.
You took my sad attempt’
'
to make of my life

     a story someone might
read, even for a moment.
Tonight I can tell you

     You are the meter
which steers the thing
I call love.

An unusual poem, filled
with all the things you are.

So I will know you when
     finally
we are met
and One.  

Caroline Shank
December 17. 2024

For Kinik
Dec 2024 · 97
Battered Footfalls
Caroline Shank Dec 2024
It's as if my life was a package forgotten on the side

of a back road.

The chance of being plucked out and found even interesting,

unconcerned.

The name addressed to Hell.


Battered by lifes footballs
the sunscorched wrapping illegible.
To love so much the
Contents arrive in Hell.
Go on. I am not done with you

So says the
Call of the Universe.
Your tears are large.
The last of my life.
I won't go on. I will
stumble through

the bramble and thistles.

You saved me once
when I believed

In a destiny.
For such a short time

No
chance of being plucked out and found even interesting, unconcerned.
The name addressed to Hell.

Battered by lifes footballs the sunscorched wrapping illegible.
To love so much the
Contents arrive in Hell.

Go on. I am not done with you
So says the

Call of the Universe.
Your tears are large.
The last of my life.
I won't go on. I will
stumble through the bramble and thistles.
You saved me once when I believed
In a destiny.


For such a short time.

Caroline Shank
Dec 2024 · 402
Lines
Caroline Shank Dec 2024
Is there a line in the
lives of you and me

which

when Crossed is like
the Rubicon?

Is it when
stumbled and
bruised

the phone
dangles,
held by conversation

that one is compelled
to wonder did I say
too much?

Love newly turned
there in the lathe
of indecision

‘Cannot bear
very much

Realty.

Mr Eliot talks of
lonely people.

Do I dare to Believe
That in you
is

Grace.  You shelter
Me.

Love lives after all.

Speculation saeculorem.


Caroline Shank
December 11, 2024
Dec 2024 · 105
Wow
Caroline Shank Dec 2024
Wow
I have a lot of stories but you are the truth

Faces in the dark.
All the same now

I rode the years with paper wings
The songs changed but the men didnt

I was along a dark path. Looked for the light

Strangers even after I should have stopped the wrestling

There Was only this
today
a perplex of pain and
searching.

You are my Knight of
Shining

The days of pain are
behind the trail of
memories.

You are my wind
and my salvation.

I Honor you.


Caroline Shank
December 10, 2024
Nov 2024 · 164
Fate
Caroline Shank Nov 2024
That's the way the cards
were dealt.

You on the other side
of the planet, me here
underneath
the subterranean
wheel of my mother's
lousy
life.

Her abuse,
the sins of her
violence.

wrap her voice around
my memories.  

There she is now,
aboard the ageing Ship
Caroline, docked
down by the stones on the

cobblestone
   of dreams.  

Look
my darling,

another love
slips
away


Caroline Shank
11.25.2025
Nov 2024 · 63
Tomorrow Creeps
Caroline Shank Nov 2024
Tomorrow creeps in its own
******* way to the last syllable
of recorded time.

It is this that worries me,
the notes i will write
around the corner..
Those metaphors that

wait

for me when love is
not there.

There are witches too
and chants.

Walk with me into the
copse

Save me my love.

Caroline Shank
11.20.2024
Nov 2024 · 104
Love is Your Song
Caroline Shank Nov 2024
I'm going now,
you can call me
at the number
here.

I am one with the
once me never
again remembered.

I'm the mother, the
grandmother and
the, now, widow.

Whoever said i should
give thanks left no
calling card.

No hello, no goodbye,.

Buddha, he of no
regrets, spent his
life ignoring the pain

of even the women.

He did not say give
thanks, he said be
still.  For eight
years he sat.

Christ said He was
not of this world, so
no wisdom from
the Christian Miracle
of the World.  He is not
talking to me now.

The Rabbi stays alone
In a Shtetl, or however
it is spelled.

I lived sans companion,
no being to give me
permission to inhabit
this or any body.

My music
was lost. I played songs
over your name.
I dont know what
that means
My love.

I  lay in
this tangle of
placques
and convolutions

on the grass
of your words.

You tell me
now

that love always

was your

Song.



Caroline Shank
11.8.2024
Nov 2024 · 106
It's Inevitable
Caroline Shank Nov 2024
My soul must be reincarnate.

Once upon a time, to wit,
in the past,  l was a
prisoner of lost love’s
leer.

Time was
A gun shot through my
dreams.

Yet still i love.

Again.

Love once
collapsed.

You called me.

My smile

unwrinkled.



Caroline Shank
11.8.2024
.
Nov 2024 · 189
Cruel is the Silence
Caroline Shank Nov 2024
Cruel is the silence after.
the love goes.
The nights when the
breeze

freezes and the frogs
lose their croak.

Silence like the stillness
  of a child's bare footed
  climb into our bed.

Midnight is the silence
     after the rain goes.

I touch the silence with
      my mind.  I map the
      road  to a

tomorrow I don't want,
never asked for.  

The place is quiet.
      There was a stop
       a ways back.

You left me by the Willow.
       I couldn't call your name

You left me by the sand dune.
       and when I looked back

you never saw me

again.


Caroline Shank
11.03.2024
Nov 2024 · 957
God's Grace
Caroline Shank Nov 2024
I cried because I'm old.
You said age is just a number.
I cried because I'm ugly,
Age has collapsed me, taken
     from me the looks of
     interest.
I cried because the end is near.

You have given me the looks
my soul seeks.

I cry now because you are
     far away.

“You Raise Me Up” plays
     on my heart.

There are tears of longing’s
     frustration
now until you happily walk
     off the plane
  
  toward our life.

when we will sing
     together happily

in
  
   God's Grace.


Caroline Shank
11.3.2024
Nov 2024 · 92
Reflections
Caroline Shank Nov 2024
Reflections
Those whose singular licks
of love grow aged and
Holy in the light of old
memories,


whose hands trace
lines on her body
in the grooves and
branches of the


forgotten, laden
with the names of
the unborn possibilities
call me in the night.


I am the listener who
Never sleeps.
I have my own stories
which trouble my pen
to widen the nights


of loss, you, and the
dreams of my


Old


Age






Caroline Shank
11.1.2024
Oct 2024 · 119
Raw is Relative
Caroline Shank Oct 2024
Raw is when I scrape my
bare knee.  While the curl of a
bleeding bone can be seen
in bas relief beneath the
red blanket of the aid
worker.

Will a bandaid help?

I think about the war, well
any war.  The rude smears
of blood, the silence that
carries voices across
continents.  Television
surpasses even what

my imagination imagines.
I think about you in the
doorway to the aid station.

The world according to
CNN.  Children's screams
form a sound blanket
over which you must
scream just to hear

your many secret sounds.

Secret for the breadth it
takes

to reach your caring
embrace.

I want to die in your arms.
If I have to fight for the

Singular look of a love

No one can

damage

I Will.



Caroline Shank
10.30.2024


.
Oct 2024 · 91
When the Universe Lies
Caroline Shank Oct 2024
When the Universe lies
once

the vellum
of the Book of Life

fades.

The ink (always there is
Ink)

Sours.

You are my Page ;
play me.

You are the

Voice in my sleep.

Crying.


Caroline Shank
10.26.2024













⁹)
Oct 2024 · 95
An American Woman
Caroline Shank Oct 2024
I am an American woman.
Rough and oddly strange.
I rebel against Dandelions,
I celebrate the omnipresent
Ladybug assault every year.

My age is irrelevant.  The
patterns in the gardens
of thought are my friends.

Some of the night’s whinning
winds wake me before
I remember you.

Time slaughters thought.
No syllables amount to
clarity of forgiveness.

I am an American woman.
I cry in private places you
know nothing about.

My God is still overseas.
In time the laws of
Harmony

will send you

also

Home.

And what will you do
with me then?

I am an American woman.
Here are my credentials…

Don't just walk on the
pages where it talks
about me.

Briefly.


Caroline Shank
Was here.
October 25, 2024

!.
Oct 2024 · 58
Dark Matter
Caroline Shank Oct 2024
Dark Matter


What if love itself were a dark
hole?  Love is blind is
a metaphor for the unloved
to concentrate on.

The lucky rabbit’s foot that
saved creation.

Birth and Rebirth

into the density
where we who love each
other

do things in which dream’s
direct the play.

There is no escape from
the known only world in
whose pulses we frolic.

Tomorrow is.
random.
beats

in a soundless
Universe.

Only to have
reality served

cold.

Caroline Shank
10.23.2024
Oct 2024 · 56
No Safe Harbor
Caroline Shank Oct 2024
There is still the rocking of
decisions amidst the myriad
daily tasks of which the
true label’s my conversation .

If Macbeth is the analogy
du jure no doubt the
witches will once again
sing the single syllable
their vocabulary utters.

I toil while the firelight remains.
The maps of my skin are
particular, I choose you.

Skies clear deep blue ever
present in the unsleep
washing over the signature’s
toes, I go on.  The petty
pace of time like the
seasons regurgitating

****** reasons goes on.


Never before has the
changed Bible paused in
it's slouching toward
Bethlehem.

“I have seen the eternal
footman snicker

and in short,
       I was afraid.”


Caroline Shank.        T.S.Eliot
10.22.2024.               Shakespeare
Oct 2024 · 70
Today is Friday
Caroline Shank Oct 2024
Today is Fr



I ponder life and sometimes
the whole solar system.
Why am I here? for what
purpose except serendipity

did God figure i should walk
the hallowed hills..  I was not
included.  But to be part of
the ******* experience
of Bill and Rita.  That did
not work out very well.

I digress that is not the Way
of Things for me now that
I am 78

So. I ponder.  That's a
silly word for the cogitations
I spend God's time with.

For instance I am presently
in the doctor’s office.  

This
poem i
read
frequently.  


I take the minute between
light and napping to be
with my friends.

I am about friends and
sharing stuff.

“I don't know much
but I know I love you.”

Aaron in the dark with you
And I slither into
reality.

“Love don't come easy”

It found me writing
the last love song.

To you.

Caroline Shank
10.17.2024
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