"--you know, I've either had a family, a job, something
has always been in the
way
but now
I've sold my house, I've found this
place, a large studio, you should see the space and
the light.
for the first time in my life I'm going to have a place and
the time to
create."
no baby, if you're going to create
you're going to create whether you work
16 hours a day in a coal mine
or
you're going to create in a small room with 3 children
while you're on
welfare,
you're going to create with part of your mind and your
body blown
away,
you're going to create blind
crippled
demented,
you're going to create with a cat crawling up your
back while
the whole city trembles in earthquakes, bombardment,
flood and fire.
baby, air and light and time and space
have nothing to do with it
and don't create anything
except maybe a longer life to find
new excuses
for.

the women of the past keep
phoning.
there was another yesterday
arrived from out of
state.
she wanted to see
me.
I told her
"no."

I don't want to see
them,
I won't see them.
it would be
awkward
gruesome and
useless.

I know some people who can
watch the same movie
more than
once.

not me.
once I know the
plot
once I know the
ending
whether it's happy or
unhappy or
just plain
dumb,
then

for me
that movie is
finished
forever
and that's why
I refuse
to let
any of my
old movies play
over and over again
for
years.

during my worst times
on the park benches
in the jails
or living with
******
I always had this certain
contentment-
I wouldn't call it
happiness-
it was more of an inner
balance
that settled for
whatever was occuring
and it helped in the
factories
and when relationships
went wrong
with the
girls.
it helped
through the
wars and the
hangovers
the backalley fights
the
hospitals.
to awaken in a cheap room
in a strange city and
pull up the shade-
this was the craziest kind of
contentment

and to walk across the floor
to an old dresser with a
cracked mirror-
see myself, ugly,
grinning at it all.
what matters most is
how well you
walk through the
fire.

i stopped writing about love and all the people
that begged for rations of my lips and eyes
i've left the pages white and neat and empty
i've kept the plastic wrap around my mind.

i stopped trying to feel something worth describing
with rhythm and with simile and rhyme.
i am collected in this box of bones and sutures
i am impossible to love past dinner time.

i stopped shaking from my heavy, dreamless sleeping,
the timing belt to which my feet are strapped.
i am locked into a ground that can't broken,
guarding mines of love like gold that can't be tapped.

i stopped writing about depth and loss and body
i packed and froze my stock of butterflies
i've kept in cages all the wild phrases
that once wandered like balloons into the skies.

i stopped turning all the pages of the scripture
i pray only after two glasses of wine
i dug until i found the clay of chaos
then stabbed my shovel dully in its spine.

i stopped writing about love and all it's meanings
i am suspended on a rope above my heart
cracking slowly under weight of empty spaces
why fall in love when you can fall apart?

sitting at the kitchen table
crying,
and trying to
explain to my mom
why i stayed
while she told me,
with small kaleidoscopes of
warped devastation
pooling in her eyes
and rolling down her cheeks,
that this is scaring her.
because, it sounds like
i’m the type of girl
who stays,
while her husband beats her.
the girl she raised.
sitting at the kitchen table
crying,
and realizing
that when you ran your hands
through my hair as you kissed me,
you were twirling my future around
your fingers.
this is scaring me
because you’ll be the guy
who carved the hole in my chest
that stays
i know i will see your fingerprints
in all the hands that will come after you.

And I Will Run.

I wake up. Quiet. The sheets beside me are cold. The sun shines trough the dewy windows. I look down at my brown knees. The nail polish on my toes is falling off. I close my eyes for a second and open them again. I leave my bed and look myself in the mirror. My eyes are as blue as the ocean, and I’ve got freckles on my nose. My lips are dry, so I wet them with my tongue. I can feel the warmth from the sun on my thighs. It’s silent.
     My mother enters the room.
     “Who?” she asks.
     “I don’t know” I answer. She leaves.
     I look at myself in the mirror again. I look pretty, with my tan skin as a contrast to my blue eyes. An eyelash has fallen off and landed on my cheek, but I don’t remove it. I look away, at the sun. It shines again today. I miss the ocean.

I've been hitting the Don't Trust button for too long.