As I wandered the dunes of Evermore,
I sought the golden key of light,
Found you there,
In my darkest night.

Now what dreams, these, that drift at night?
They break my bones, reveal a plight,
As star struck wanderers wove their tales,
And sang songs to one another of purest light,
There slipped a crack through the veil.

I hang my head now,
And sing this sad tale.*  

The purest love, born on high,
Did ring our hearts and bind,
Yet faltered step upon the path
Did lose us on our way.

Dim grew the day,
As secrets held,
And puzzles became the way,
Of reading hearts and asking thoughts,
The clouds began to rain.
  
What love is this that sings my heart,
And draws me ever near?
More than mine to have and hold,
Shame brings me to reveal.
  
Slipped and fell upon gentle trails,
Now this love, how it longs!
I read the struggle in my words,
I hear it in every song.

I sing now, to set it right,
To show I know the truth.
My blood it boils, and face does flush,
Yet cannot keep, the love I feel,
With no place here to rest.

I slipped the path,
I slipped the path,
And broke your dearest trust!
  
Words to find to write this time,
Can not ever tell,
The sorrow I now feel,

In losing you,
In losing true,
Losing, losing you.


I loved you so much,
I wanted to see all of you,
Surround you with my love.

I still do.  
I still do. 

How can this be righted now?
Will there ever be a way?

I wanted to speak honestly,
Not darken all your days.  
Not cloud your brow,
Nor break your heart,
Nor cause you any, smallest pain.  
But could not find a way to dwell,
And keep this in my heart.  

You burst upon me night and day,
I've fallen off the ledge.
Barely breathing from wanting you,
It's time you cast me away.

To keep to true,
Keep for you,
Leave me mine,
Leave me behind.

To say I'm sorry, seems so small,
And doesn't heal a thing at all. 
I didn't know,
I didn't plan,
I did not come to steal.
Nothing I can say at all,
Nothing i can do.  

*Losing true,
Losing true,
Losing, losing you.

At night, my dreams are wrapped around you.

Silken sheets,
Sweat,
Sweetly sworn promises.

When I wake,
I seek a reasonable existence,
And you are nowhere to be found.

Lover, I know your hiding ways.
Your solitary existence can never include me.

And I know my dancing dreams can make no sense
In your tragic,  melancholy world.

Still, I dream this silken, sweaty dream,
Where your lonely tears warm my cheeks,
And my cheekiness tears into your loneliness.

I pray this prayer:
That we will both wake up before it is too late.

Whatever other costumes might have been hers for the choosing,
She wore the robe of disenchantment.

She should have been taught,
Truth skates a razor thin line that will slice the flesh from your bones
When you try to deny it.  

The mask she placed upon her face, a tragicomic mockery of belief,
Its blue-black marks tattooing her cheeks,
Were a constant reminder of her mistaken identity of herself,

Mistake.


(And in that moment of stark realization,
Didst thou not ponder the sickening irony of a life gone awry?)

I strike a hot match against those Front-Porch-Sitting-Mowing Freaks who live across the street.

I'm out there every morning;
Afternoons, too,  
My grass stands tall,
And my fingers dance lightly across my dulcimer.

I'm strumming 'Wildwood Flower', mistakes and all.
I get serious with 'Whiskey Before Breakfast', not well done.
But then I break out with '******* Creek.'
And who can fault me for that one?
It's a happy tune, done well, or poorly.

Those **** neighbors sit across the way.
They don't even bother to stare.

Something has changed.
There is still no sparkle in their eyes,
But I am happy.

*It isn't my job to entertain the world.

Your broken paced brand of love has worn me down.
I was a once sharpened pencil,  now worn to a nub.

You were the sharp rock that cracked my alabaster shell.
And you never even knew it,
You never even knew.

I have no strength to blame,
There is no need to ask my forgiveness.

I could have wrapped myself around you,
A blanket that would have kept you ensconced.

But you ran;
You ran until you could run no further.

You laid yourself down.
You slept the sleep of 'I give up."

I did my best to wake you.
I grabbed you by your mind's eye shoulders and shook you.
I shook you hard.

But your poppy-laced dreams have held your eyes fast closed.

*And now I weep for what might have been.
I wring salt-water from my tear stained dress.
I weep for the emerald city that could have been ours.

The stately iris stands in the vase alongside the slap-happy sunflower.
They don't belong together, and everyone knows.
But the people are too polite to point out the obvious.

*Those flowers are just gonna sit there and wilt.

I was a bruised orange,
That round piece of fruit that had been dropped, over and over again.  
Dropped so many times, my insides had turned to sour mash.
(It was a distasteful sort of mush.)
I hid my mushiness behind an exterior of bright orange skin.

(I thought I had fooled everyone but myself.)

He swept into my life, in backward fashion,
Giving himself away to erase the disasters of my wounds.

He was eraser crumbs.
His history, one of being casually swept from the page
As others made their revisions.

Had he not been there?  
Life would have dug a hole through my crepe paper heart,
Scraping and scratching
With its hard, unforgiving end.

But he was eraser crumbs;
He slid easily across my page.

Lonely is the heart that sings alone.

She beats steady on,
But her song,
Half-written,
Lingers lonely.

She hovers near memories,
Not yet created,
Not yet sung.

Joy abides in the celebration of tradition, transformed,
The claiming of creation as your own.

Lover, you give meaning to my life!
I want you home (that would be here, my dear!)

With You

I want to explore oceans of light,
And forests of darkest night.

Climb the here and now summit,
Planting the
Flag of conquered*
Our four hands, entwined.

You bring me to a place of bravery,
That place where I can shout,
"Look here!  Find your reason!
There is no doubt!"

Beautiful man,
You walk a tight rope,
You bounce and sway.

You walk your way to me,
I fold myself within your embrace.

*You take me home.

I dream of beautiful things,
Sounds of a warm spring.
A life of joy.
Mimicry.

I want to melt into worlds of beginnings,
Listen to the music of presence.

I want to be.

"Oh, ***!"

You are the loosener of tongues!
I can wrap my mind around my own ellipses...
The convoluted hills and valleys of
"Do you know what truth is?"

The box poses on my table,
So patient in its guise.
Allures its extent to baffle,
And prove me thus unwise.

To draw me closer it will bait
And lure by fine sweet sounds,
Perplexity my new bed mate,
Mischief that knows no bounds.

I lie in this bed and ponder,
Choice is mine, is it not?
What gifts inside I do wonder!
Temptation's guile my lot.

Gilded and exquisitely wrought,
Intricacy unparalleled,
My prolonged resistance for naught,
My hand thus adroitly compelled!

I want to drive a million miles and bring you home, where you belong.  
I am patiently composed on the outside, but inside of myself?  

Oh!

I am a squirming mess of,
'Please, God, can we begin the forever part now?'

Do you see how you move inside of me?  
Are you quite certain that you can tackle this poet's heart?

I am a mess, and well aware of who you are.

You are cotton candy, spun so light and sweetly;
It doesn't matter to me one bit if you are pink, or blue.
You are sweet things written into the air.
  
I want to **** you into my mouth,
Inhaling your beauty into my lungs.

You are cotton candy,
So light and delicate,
So ready to melt upon my tongue.

Today, someone rang my bell.
For the first time in two years, my first thought was,

"I wonder who that could be?"

Prior to this day,
--Oh, this glorious, beautiful day!--
A ringing bell was an emergency siren met with dread and fear,
A signal for full alert, always accompanied by that feeling of impending doom;
Screaming out from the pores of my skin--

"Where can I hide?!"

I'm sure you can't understand or even possibly relate.
You, with your normal life.  
You, who feel safe within your home.
You, who think nothing of the buzzing of a bell, nothing but happy anticipation.

Today, I had a normal reaction to a very normal occurrence.
And I felt victorious.

Today, I felt surging within me something akin to hope,
Something that bubbled up inside of me, shouting out,  
*"Yes, you can and will live life again."

His love is eager, pure, and real.

He is all that is good in the world.
Purple Wysteria, tangled in my hair,
And I am drunk on his scent.

I lose myself in him each day, as he tells me of

His worries,
                                    
                                            hopes,

                                                                              dreams.


He opens to me like a flower,
Revealing to me those delicate, soft places.
Oh yes, he is so solidly, so tenderly human.

And I am pixie dust, wanting to fly him to the moon;
I want to give him wings.

Oh, he is love warmed to perfection,
And I am his oven.

Worth a share...a powerful piece that has moved me so deeply.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v;=ltun92DfnPY#!

All the roads, footpaths, and roughened trails of my beginnings
Lead me to the map of your heart, that long buried treasure.
I will trace words and phrases along the contours of your lips,
And glide cautiously across the footbridge of your wanting.
You will be stilled by the weight of my breath upon your brow,
And you will know love at a pace that awakens you to your own preciousness.

He tells me he is sorry, falling down and scrubbing his face in the dirt.
And it was such a small thing that he had done!
His remorse seemed out of proportion.
Did he think me so judgmental?  
Or that I would so easily turn away?

Imperfections revealed are the delicate strands which bind a person to another.
It is in this revelation, this exposure of our humanity, where grace is allowed to grow,
And humility is allowed to flourish.

Here, where acceptance wears the purple coat,
Nobility is nothing more than the mark of a soul in tune.

Last night I dreamed of roughened hands,
And pristine walls with spackled sand,
And feeling less,
But wanting more,
Of windows open,
And a creaking door.

Last night I dreamed of voices mild,
And smiling faces, and laughter loud,
I dreamed of grackles in parkling lots,
Of finding familiar and imagining what.

I dreamed of witchcraft and of lore,
And linen hidden in a dresser drawer.

I dreamed of you,
I dreamed of you,
And all the things I'd like to do.

The memory of him is black gravel peppered under the skin of my soul.
There is a burn and a sting that no amount of debriding will remove.
Twenty years of sliding down a dead end street,
And I am left raw and road weary at the end of it all.

And where do I go from here?  Where do I go?
Do I pick up the scraps of my worn down soul
And hobble back the way I came?

It is travelling in reverse, and my soul ****** well knows it.

I wonder why I wore the leather armor, and not the metal, not the metal?

I was a strong woman, and he was a troubled man.
And in that moment of unselfish confusion,  
He put on the maille, and I was pleased.

It was travelling in reverse,
And I ****** well knew it;
I ****** well knew.

The memory of him is black gravel peppered under the skin of my soul.

My neighbor mows his grass at night.
Back and forth he marches, pushing his mower in tight, tidy rows.
He has a lovely sprinkler system.  
It keeps his lawn green, and growing, year round.

Also, he decorates.
For fourth of July this year, he hung a light up American flag on his garage door.
He messed up a little, and it hung upside down.  
He never did fix it, but I'm pretty sure he's much more patriotic than I am, even so.  

In October, he hung a giant, painted jack o lantern on his fence, along with a black cat.
They looked nice, friendly even.
He took it down on October 30th, and he kept his porch light off on Halloween night.

I don't remember Thanksgiving, but I'm sure there was something,
A turkey, bales of hay, pumpkins.  
Probably, he wore a Pilgrim's hat to work every day.  
I would have liked to see that.

At Christmas time, there was a light up tree that he planted in his front lawn.
Also, reindeer, those white ones with lights that move their heads up and down.
Best of all, though, he had one of those leg lamps.  Like from that movie, 'The Christmas Story'?
And it was no scaled down version like you might find at Target, let me tell you.  
No, this leg belonged to a woman  five foot seven, at the very least.
I could see it shining from his living room window every single night for a month.

My neighbor mows his grass at night.
Or sometimes at five in the morning, if that is what works best for him that day.
Two or three times a week, I hear him out there mowing.
Yes, even in January.

His wife operates the blower.  
She blows the leaves that fall off my trees and drift into her yard.
She blows them into the middle of the street, then turns, and goes into her house.

Sometimes, the two of them will sit on a bench in their yard.
That bench faces my yard, my front door.
Whenever they sit out there, they look straight ahead while they are talking.  
It FEELS like they are talking about me.

Me, and all my fallen leaves from the Red Oak that have not yet made their way into their lawn.  
Me, and my Bermuda grass that hangs over the side of the curb, crispy and brown.
That grass scares them, threatening to creep across the road and into their own landscape.
Me, and my hooligan children who turn on the water hose in the summertime.
They just let it run while they play and laugh.  
Sometimes, they squirt the cars driving by.
This drives the neighbors bonkers.

I remember when we first moved in, they brought over a casserole, and introduced themselves.
I thought, 'Oh boy, they are gonna be tough.'
And they are.  They are.

My ex almost lover slides down the page of my messages.
I've got a whole book of faces, and his is the only one I'm looking for.
I have to click the 'see all' button to even catch a glimpse of him,
And even then, it is only his back in the mirror as he walks away.

I count days, hours, moments.
I memorize lines, words, syllables.
Soon, I will make the decision to try to forget him.
The lovely ex almost lover does not know this.
He thinks (at least I imagine he does) that I've already forgotten.

But he beats a staccato song inside my chest, like a hard rain on packed, dry earth.
He wakes me every night with his silence,
Like summer coming to an end, the cicadas ceasing their chorus.  
You don't know how accustomed your ears have become,
How much you need that sound, until it vanishes,
Becoming nothing more than an echo of memory.

A week goes by before you ever realize what it is that has been intruding on your sleep.
There is an absence of the familiar,
and to keep yourself from falling off the edge into the abyss,  
'dear God, will I spend the rest of my life alone?'
(Breathe!)
That habit of loving shadows reinvents itself.


*Once, I believed in fairy tales.
Maybe, I always will.

Bury me under a thousand pounds of unwritten promises;
You are the sand that weighs heavy upon my shore.

While the shadow ghost of dreams dances lightly through currents of my remorse,
The moonlight shimmers brilliance upon your still waters.

Bury me under a thousand pounds of unwritten promises;
Hold me fast within the depths of your silent longing.

I poured my grief into your ocean;
My love fell gentle into your waves.

There are a lucky few of us, who benefit from the paltry services of the mental healthcare system.
The rest of us, well, we are the ones who walk naked down the street with absent faces.
We are the ones who sit alone and ***** on the street corners of your small town America.
Your America.
We mutter nonsense to ourselves, for the sake of a sanity that was denied us.
Denied us, yes, as we sought and sought a solution to our degradation, but we never could grasp that golden ring.

Mrs. Murphy trims her hedges.
And we walk obtrusively through the park
on your warm, sunny, sky blue happy day,
seeking love and connection with our own humanity in the garbage receptacles
that are scattered down the paths of our solitary confinement.

And in your eyes?  Yes, yours!
We seek our solace, our redemption.
If only a single soul would glance up,
and connect with the eyes of our soul starved, 'yes, here I am, friend!'

We seek the self same recognition that you do.
We seek that opportunity to be.
That opportunity to be loved.

Oh lover!   Your absent heart has left me wanting.
Your unfocused mind has left me wandering.
You are a playing field, and I am the ball.*

Bounce me.


Words are funny things;
We think we know them;
We think we have mastery over them,
That they are ours to manipulate.

But words, they have a life of their own,
And the power they can speak, we do not fully grasp.

Maybe, words will spill out of you tomorrow morning
As the sun lifts it's brow,
And you are in your bathrobe drinking coffee.
Will you be waiting for them?   Will you listen?

Maybe.

Or, perhaps you will be engrossed in the sports section
When the next clear moment arrives.
And you will miss hearing it.

And those words will fly on past you
And settle on the ears of another,
Less inclined to avoidance of the truth.

I lowered my bucket into the well of words
And raised it up, hand over fist,
While syllables and phrases sloshed about,
Some spilling over
In my eagerness to drink them deep.

Oh, how I wanted to be filled up.


The words poured out,
And they emptied into the clay jar of my disconnected soul,
Rubra terra terra firma incognita
Plant me deep and water these roots.
(Am I real? Will I always be?)

And oh, how they filled me up.

I spoke the words aloud,
And they slithered between the cracks of my shattered glass self,
Amber crackled sunlight streaming right on through,
It looked like I would go on forever (and ever, ever)

And oh, the words broke me open.

Yesterday, I printed some of my poems.
Black letters on ivory, one hundred percent cotton, twenty-four pounds.
It felt strange to hold my words in my hands,
making concrete, that abstract part of myself.

Here is the proof, there is more to me.
There is more.

Is it really possible to uncover these secret,
hidden places within myself?

Are a rose, and the scent of a rose, one and the same?

We walked along and I thought about
the green birds I wanted to show you,
the crunch of crushed red granite beneath my feet,
and the way your hand lightly bumped into mine,
asking the question your mouth could not.

Tread carefully, now.
A tiger rests in my chest.
She gathers her strength.

Tread carefully, now.
A tiger sleeps in my chest.
She dreams of waking.

Tread carefully, now.
A tiger stirs in my chest.
Crouching low,
The deep rumbling
Begins.

Tread carefully, now.
A tiger springs from my chest.
She waits no longer.

In dreams she struggles,
Bursting from her prison cage.
Her eyes shine diamonds.

I am a war torn casualty hopelessly lost in an unfamiliar landscape.
I pick myself out of the rubble of a crumbled existence,
casting aside the well worn masks of my own invisibility.

I am stopped in this breathing place,
my quiet cocoon of safety
where unpredictability does not dwell,
but neither here does life,
neither here do I.
The silent screams that well up inside me never find their way out
and my door remains locked, the world shut out.

"The war is over,"  I try to convince myself.

This is my holding pattern.
I wonder will I ever feel brave
enough to unlock that door and
venture forth into life again?

Who am I without my captor's angry lies,
that cruel mouth that formed words defining me,
those rough hands that molded me
into the shapeless form of his invention?

I never thought to tuck myself away in safety,
hide myself in a tiny crack, or between pages of a book,
my treasured keepsake that I could run fingers over later,
smiling and whispering, "Yes, I know you."

No, I abandoned myself years ago,
left myself a motherless child.

The hands on the clock go round and round.
I dig through rubble behind a locked door,
searching for the girl I abandoned long ago
on the battlefield of disenchantment.

I lie in bed, under cover,
fear rising up through the pores of my skin;
it leaks from my hair.

My door is locked; there are no monsters under my bed.
The only demons here live inside my head,
in muscle, bone, cell memory.

Tall and impenetrable is the brick wall that locks me out, that locks me in.
Sarcasm drips from the corner of my mouth, first laughing, then crying,
my face stuck in a perpetual open mouthed gape of surrendered indecision.

Anger trickles through my toes, almost imperceptible,
a shallow breath slowly exhaled, a child hiding in the dark.

The cool porcelain of disavowed feeling snakes between my fingers,
settles in my palm.

Who protects me from my own rage?

Nowhere left to hide,
smashing dishes under cover.

Were you to pass a thousand years drifting
In memories doubly drenched in sorrow,
You would find me pacing the shore waiting
To welcome you home, life's new tomorrow.

Within this land of love's patient slumber,
I will cradle your tender, worried heart
'Til time allows you to disremember
The burdens of grief which set you apart.

Then bring your ship sailing straight home to me;
I am forever your warm water port.
I've sent sweet scented streams out to your sea,
Now awaken to my gentle escort.

  My love is a current, steady and true
  I am your safe harbor;  I wait for you.

I chase words and phrases
round and round inside my head.
My thoughts slide.
They are soft butter on a hot knife.

Dripping from the blade,
they slip, without pretense,
into my waiting hand.

I cup these thoughts in my palm,
and pour my melted butter words
onto your paper heart.

white, blank page

stretches out before me,

a highway untraveled.

jammed under my nail is the pain of you
with blood that cannot flow (from a wound that cannot bleed)
my finger in my mouth, i try to **** you out,
tiny flaw that flashes white hot in my skull.

the carrion of your memory has left an imprint impossible to erase.
i would cut off my hand to be free of you,
but too late, your poison courses through my veins,
your pith of pain absorbed,
rooted forever in my bones, my splintered soul.

the joyful dancer of my youth
prances about my room, whispering
truths to my all but deafened ears.

'go away,' i respond.  'you belong to a time
i am no longer a part of.'

she takes my hand, but the skeleton of
my existence pulls away from her.

'did you think it would be so easy to get
me out to the dance floor again?'

i am a stubborn woman,
lost to the steps of dancing ways.

no, i choose now to sit here and watch.
the tango of life dances, her fluid body
pouring itself across the floor.

i am a poet, you see, and i set myself
here on these sidelines because observation
and reflection are the only things that keep my
heart beating.

participation?  she speaks a language too foreign
to my ears for comprehension.

you would chase ghosts down a narrow corridor
seeking absolution from your own regrets.  

don't think for a minute you'll find your answers there.
the love unfolds at whatever pace you are willing to set.

joy is reserved for the heart that forgives the past,
and beats itself wildly into the future.

the lines that fall apart and end up in the trash
are part of this poet's repertoire as well.  perhaps,
if i brought them out and sang songs to them they
would feel loved enough to complete themselves.

i want to be more than incomplete.  i want to begin
at the beginning, and run on through to the end, in
satisfaction.

but sometimes, it is within the spaces, within the stops
and starts and crumpled paper disappointments that we
find the very thing that we need to be at peace.

"Write", she says.

"I have nothing to say", I answer.

But, of course, it is a lie.  I have plenty to say.
It is a matter of staying hidden.  

Sometimes, I want to be invisible.  

"Don't look at me", I say, "Just see me."

*I am the invisible substance of subconscious,
and I want nothing more than to be found.

and the moon came down from the sky
long enough to listen to your story.

did you remember to give voice to your dreams?
were you brave enough to speak them aloud?

i had not gone fishing that night.

the sun was down, with dark clouds hovering low.
me, in my rudderless boat, staring at the sky.
was i thinking of fish?  I think i was just lost at sea.

i was thinking, (well, i don't remember exactly)
caught up in a brief break in the clouds.  the stars
were out, shining their shining.   i saw them,
but didn't.  i was looking for the moon, her full, hovering
beauty imprinted still on my mind.

but this night, the moon was but a sliver of light, and i...
i was without remorse.  i had come to that place of understanding
that the moon's light neither waxes nor wanes within the confines of
shadow.  she becomes invisible in this shadowland, and perhaps this
is for the best, for who can take the beauty of the moon on a starless
night and call her their own?  she was not mine to have.

and the tide, it pulled me in, it pushed me out;  this motion set about
by the moon. (oh, my moon!)  

i looked out, saw the waves come lapping gentle onto my boards.
the crash and slap, the rocking of my boat, shook me from
my reverie.  i looked down, saw these dreams gasping at my feet.

oh, beautiful dreams born of moon and tide, how did you land here,
and why?  i saw your gasping, your grasping at calming waters.

who was i to return you to your sea?  
i was only a lost and rudderless boat.  
i had not gone fishing that night;
i was no fisherman.

yet i took you home, slipped you into my
warm, salty waters and called you my own.

i'm reading tea leaves again.
this comes along with counting tiles, i suppose.
conversations carried out to their inevitable conclusion
inside my mind always have the worst endings.

when did i become so insecure?

i'm wondering at this point about the wisdom of wearing
hearts on sleeves and all that jazz. it would be
better for my mental health to be more stone-like.

i am a rock, i am a rock, i am a rock.

too late, i realize,
i am rock candy,
and you have me in hot water.

oh mind, your whirling dervish dancing

leaves you dizzy and reeling.  do you not

know answers fly apart in the centrifuge?