I am pulling weeds from the garden and I want to scream "there is nothing wrong with you there is nothing wrong with you there is nothing wrong you"
I am replacing you with something beautiful and hard to maintain because I value appearances more than growth
There is nothing wrong with dandelions i swear, please do not develop a complex, I just cannot love you unless someone else does
My father spent years weeding me and trust me it gets easier
it hurts less if you learn to hate yourself the same way
There is nothing wrong with you I just have to do this he is coming over later and he might remember he doesn't love me if he sees you here
There is nothing wrong with you but I will **** you still
Like my father
Commended for everything I grow in the wake of what I ****
There is nothing wrong with you I scream but I will throw you away and you will wonder what is wrong with you anyway
He told me I have room to grow before hugging me goodbye
There is nothing wrong with you he said
I just don't want you here

I knew I was good
I felt it when I looked down
Reveling in the work I'd done,
Yelling and proclaiming
So that you would know too
That I was good.
Oh, how small I was,
How small a thing to make you so angry.
I didn't know yet
How to make my joy quiet
For your bad days.
You would have loved it
If you'd have taken the time
To look at it.
To really look at it,
To look at me.
Would you have looked?
If I was good?

She numbly sits in a ragged sleep shirt
Her life in tatters all around her,
Pieces scattered bent and broken
It’s cold and raining in her soul
And she lost her new umbrella.

Celebration banners flap in tatters
From the New Year party deemed long over.
Confetti pools in puddles at the curb
Staining rainbows in the murky water.
The echo of the midnight chime a memory.

Three hundred unfulfilling days await her
Should she stumble to her crippled feet
And stagger to the place that should be home.
But there will be no cocoa by the hearth fire
Or anything that might engage her mind
Except the fact that there will be no rescue.

Sitting numbly in her ragged sleep shirt
She has no thought of any better place
Available to someone with an injury like hers.
An wound that cripples ingenuity
And renders her unwelcome
In the tangled depths of her own mind.
        ljm

To be without a reason
to be.

To be a worn inside out
kind of being.  To miss you mostly
your absence, like
falling water,

puddles.

You make the tears
want to fall.  You slant from the
pictures .
Grant me Oh Lord a minute.

I am trimmed in half.  Your
consecrated remains on
the bookshelf.

Tomorrow is the Blessing
that holds the map of
living without you.

You walked in the Garden.
You never said that kissing
was underrated.  It's how

you left in your bed in a
May afternoon.  The
last time to say I loved

you turned away.  Was
life with me so hard?

You ran to God to save
your demented soul.

I watched from my window
As

you

Flew away.


Caroline Shank
6.24.2023

Time is a blink, a tiny ***** of passing sky
reflected in the cast unseeing eye of Neptune's dolphin
lost to a storm millennia ago
a fountain chained to the deck of a wreck
bound for the palace of a forgotten king
proud ruler of some distant land
yet here it lays in watery sand
and waving weaving fishy grass
only the truly ancient know
that all things pass

FOR  HIM ALSO I POURED OUT MANY TEARS

I follow in the footsteps of
Mary Queen of Scots.

Time has fallen away.
It is another Fortheringay day.

its where & when
no longer matters.

A bird sings the morning
into being

Mary & I both
listening

to the self
same song.

Time no longer holds sway.
History has run away.

The moment holds
its own

amidst a sea
of seconds we

escape Time's clutches
share the song

the bird creates for us

the morning shivering
in the  heat haze

of now.

*

For him also I poured out many tears
First when he made himself possessor of this body.
Of which then he had not the heart.
After he gave me one other hard charge,
When he bled great quantities of blood,
Through which great sorrow brought further sadness to me
That almost carried away my life, and the fear
Of losing the only strength that armed me.

MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS

Visiting Fotheringay whilst reading her poetry and singing Sandy Denny to myself.,...a bird joined in and time  seemed to collapse in upon itself and Mary and I shared the same moment.

THIS OLD HOUSE

a river
of people
flow through this house

sharing time
on this earth
with sunlight and shadow

a parrot
a cat
a dog

people come
people gone
first many then none

the wall paper
goes from hideous
("This will have to go!")

to nicer
every now and then
and then again

hideous as
once
was

strip away wallpaper
to find children's heights
and ages in pencil

small Paul
shoots up above
an envious elder brother

who always
begrudges him
his new found height

a do-it-yourselfer
becomes at once
an emotional archeologist

here a wall is
broken through
one room becomes two

the house leaves
a trail of owners
then landlord after landlord

my own good self
reflected in
the past of others

the ghost of who
they have been
walking from decade to decade

a couple from 1963
newly arrived
newly married

after a lifetime
(so it seems)of living
in sin

he half Irish
she ever so English
with a touch of Dutch

there now
a spinster
dying alone in a sunset

a cross section
of humans
all kinds

the house
a kaleidoscope
of times

people
a living
palimpsest  

the house
contains them all
Time in full flood

a ghost
walks through a wall
gets stuck

between 1907
and 1967
grandfather clock bongs

and bongs again
Time is so
fragile a thing

I too( I see )
will leaves this house
become as one

with the many who
flow through
this place

this place now
a place no more
in some future

that will
not contain
(strangely)me

humans
the flotsam and jetsam
of Time

I want to travel with you
in Summer or a Winter along
the pavements
thick with the sounds of
falling feet, trampled dreams,.
The detritus of lives lived by
the thin soled.

I offer you old hands to hold,
Wishes warmed by heat.
The loved fingers that will
undo you In the theater of
your imagination.

We will talk of things imagined.
Our stories flung into the gas
fire of old age. We will go
places only books invite us
into, brush skin of
our fine lines.

We hold
onto the strings of time

for

as long as

galaxies of desire

rock us.


Caroline Shank
6.22.2023