I am 4.
14.
24.
38.

I am 38 and you’re making me scrambled eggs.

You got the call and you’re making me scrambled eggs.

It’s the night before the morning of your transplant.

Old women sing of their mothers.
And I know I will always miss you when you’re gone.

But not today.
Not today.

I’m sorry, I say.
And you say, no. I’m your mama.

I’ll always be here to make you scrambled eggs.

I am 38.
24.
14.
4.

And we’re at the kitchen table. You’re so tired and I’m so little and it’s so late.

I’m sorry, I say.

And you say, no. I’m your mama.

I’ll always be here to make you scrambled eggs.

I remember the first time I got high.

My boyfriend’s mom
Had bough croissants
The day before.

It’s Thanksgiving Eve
And these croissants
Are delicious.

There’s something so comforting
In trading in everything
The taking and giving
Of motherhood

What does it mean to be whole?
Shifting your insides around an additional soul?
The pain and the toll
Of motherhood

How to express
The vastness of universes
Alongside the mundane  
Of getting dressed in the morning?

There’s something so absolute
Something so boundlessly true
In the brown of the root and the red of the fruit
In the green of the shoots
Of motherhood

Exhaustion is a thousand starving mouths;
Insomnia, a single gnawing doubt.

There’s a monster lurking
Jerking
Working at the chains fixed to the wall

It’s gnawing,
ever sawing
Ever sawing through the gristled gall

And here I am
A traitor
Telling tales
Upon the bristled ball

Oh treason, tongue of daggers, poison apple take the fall!

I stare into the maw.

- - -

I wander through the mists of mourning
Pearls adorning every limb
As tears.

They drop and drip,
they pour in
waves, cascades
they coat my lips as fears

And warnings, death and din
And here I am, a berth of sin
A deer,

the headlights imminent,
the rain downpouring,
glistening and raw;

I stare into the maw.

It is rare that I see me in you.

Oh my word, they all say,
She looks just like her daddy!

They’re right, of course.
The snub of your nose, the sleepy turn of your eyes,
The golden autumnal hue of your shining hair.

No, I rarely catch my reflection in your mirror.

This morning, though,
you didn’t know I was looking.
You were staring out the window, music playing in the background,
At some blissful something in the cloudy October sky
And I flashed to the moon chasing the car when I was six years old.
Nine.
Thirteen.
Listening to Paul Simon and Linda Ronstadt with dreamy ears in the dark backseat of my parents’ old GM conversion van:

“Joseph’s face was Black as night, and the pale yellow moon shone in his eyes.”

And suddenly I’m blinking back tears on the way to the babysitter on a pearlescent early-fall day,
Fearing as sharply as hoping,

Please god let her have inherited the moon.

I should be asleep
Or playing the guitar.

I should be planning my next moves
Like the spider who lives in the screen door
Always weaving, weaving,
Catching her flies.


I should be asleep
Or playing the guitar
Or planning, weaving,
Catching flies.

Whoever heard of a person who just sits?

Yet here I sit.

Just.

Sitting.

I’ve been unsupported lately.
Not a leg to stand on.
Some would call it untethered.

Floating.

A kinder soul might liken it to flying,
But they would be wrong.

Flying starts and ends with both feet on the ground.

It is calm
It is sour on the tongue
And then sweet
A green apple
Rainwater
Just a capful.
Petrichor
In my living room
Behind the eyes
In my living room.

I am calm.
I am sour on the tongue
And then sweet.
A secret. In my living room.
Just a capful of rainwater
On the tongue.

It is calm.
A green apple.

It is calm.
Just a capful.

I place the pacifier not -in- your hand
But near it.

You surely will find it there
Right there
In the dark
When you are searching for comfort.

I nudge it a little closer,
Thinking of little girls whose parents don’t protect them
And wishing I could climb over these rails
Into this little crib
And hold you hold you hold you.

I bid the pacifier take over,
Sleep tugging me away from you with its persistent hand.
A curse, really, to abandon my post.

How many hours do we lose to sleep?
I would give them all up
To stretch this time out and out and out.
You, dreaming your mysterious dreams
And me, right there when you awaken.

Reclaiming my time
From tequila to lime
Breathing the air, and
Pretending it’s mine

I am out of practice.
So many parts of my former self swirl around like the last catch of a half-remembered dream.
I am out of practice.

Having a baby will change you, they say.
and they’re right.
I am changed.

But tonight I am the same me of a thousand me’s ago, the whole me, the core.

It’s hope.
That’s the instigator,
and I hope my daughter can see that.

Your whole me is worth fighting for.

There’s a spark
Cradled in the hot and glowing dark
Divine
And all mine
A hidden or forgotten corner
Once a wasteland
Now a hearth

(Burn this ******* forest to the ground)

Kindling catches
Discarded matches
Wild; raging
The brain detaches

My then boyfriend
Now husband
Never forgave you for putting your hand on my thigh,
Casually mentioning the ******* beaches in the south of France.
Your daughter needed a chaperone on your family’s upcoming vacation.

You went and I stayed of course
The ******* beach all the poorer for my absence.

I am not the kind of girl who
Finds herself at Disney Paris at the end of the movie.
That’s not the way this movie ends, anyhow.

12 years later
One lung lighter
Tens of millions denser
and poised to send your daughter
to Dartmouth
Or Tulane
Or anywhere she’d rather.

She’ll have everything the world could offer her
In exchange for her father.

A parent shouldn’t have to know.

So I forgave you the hand thing
And the lewdness of a drunken survivor
Poised on the lip of an ever-widening hole.

If you asked to take me now,
I think I’d go.
I’ve always wanted to see the Louvre.
I can almost hear it:
The clicking heels and murmurs,
Your overwrought humanities professor explanations of this or that and me humoring you with appropriate reverence as always,
And the dead certain silence of the thing we will not speak about,
Pointedly conspicuous in its absence,
Filling the space between.

I wipe away mascara,
Glad, so glad, to cry with you.

It was a rough day
We tried.

We are all creatures of emotion
And what do we really ever leave behind
But our attempts at understanding?

Our attempts at crawling inside someone else
And crying with them?

The loss so great,
We’re overwhelmed by their suffering as they relay their first earthquake;
Their restraining order against their child’s father.

I am the odd man out
And I’m still okay,
Wiping away mascara.

Glad, so glad, to cry with you.

Rachel coughs in the room next to me
A mattress on the floor cradling her softly
As the air mattress beneath me dies a slow, excruciating death.

(I chose this for myself -
Rachel has a bad back, remember;
My own back groans in protest.)

We moved you from Cleveland to San Diego -

three days of driving

- Rachel and my competing energies warring silently the entire time,

Both wishing

The other

were not there.

I reflect on the number:

3.

It’s your brother’s jersey number
And everywhere in your mother’s house
(Ten years now since he chose
To leave this earth)

We three kings,
The magic number,
Prime.

A crowd.

Its my birth order
Three of Five
-the middle child-

Guess I’ve always been
The odd man out.

Wine slides into my belly
Hot and acid
Mm, needs to breathe.

Empty, a domed cavern
Hipbones,
my mother aghast.

Cast the flashlight around.
If there’s a heart here,
Let it show itself and
BEAT.
Rage the kettle drums
Of war.

Unleash in pieces,
Conceal the door.

Red with pink flowers
This blanket
And maybe on my insides too.
Blossom as they break apart.

Machine, start
Crush and crunch your barbs
Flick the crumbs away and reshape:
Curly hair remorseful,
Sad and sorry face.

You know I love being right
And I knew this was going to be a ******* day.

Every job interview
Feels like fighting to prove that
I deserve to exist.

Sitting at the kitchen table in a towel
Eating strawberry yogurt,
I wonder if I’ll leave on time.

32 minutes and counting.

I don’t know what you want,
What you like.
Write and write
To the tune of my own insight
Little praise,
Wish I might.

For a validation addict,
Pouring out my heart
To crickets
Is a nifty trick.

Stay the blinds.
The closeness of the flat and gray
Press ever forward,
Yes,
Forward and down,
the tidal wave of day
A promise delivered,
the threat of suggestion
An unbarring of the way.

Stay the blinds.
Speak to the shadows
Unhurried in their fleeting,
lingering upon the fragile lace
sighs and forget-me-nots
Caught in the corner just there,
Unmolested in the graze of a wallpaper seam,
Beneath the scattered fluff
Of yesterday’s brushed away minutes.

Stay the blinds,
If only for another moment,
Before the roaring morning
with its advancing demands
Breaks the surface of this dark, pooled reverie.

My 60 lb lap dog,
Wet nose pushed under my calf in the just-morning.

Ruiner of couch cushions
and muddy backyards,
Seeker of the softest blankets,
Speaker of many grumbling, awooing, harrumphing languages,
Your gigantic brown eyes home to the secrets of the universe.
My sassy girl, head tucked beneath my chin,
Here you sit, leaned casually
Against my side, your arm
Lap-barring me into place:

“Stay.”

The spinning hand
of fickle fate
Will rarely land
Square at the gate

So if it do,
Set fear aside.
With faith anew,
Push the gate wide.

Oh no.
This is it, isn’t it?
When I wake up tomorrow
It will be time to go home
To start my new life.
Early 60s guitars, Connie Francis
Singing “who’s sorry now?”
in that eternal swoony teenage croon.
Dissolving the gathering dread
Into sand for the hourglass
Rather than lock it away down down in my gut
to harden into glass.

We hid today
In the close cocoon
Of your living room.
You, taking meetings,
And me doing **** all,

Consuming your food.

32 hours is just 4 8 hour drives,
I tell you.
It’s really not that far.

Trying to soak up all of these moments
Murphy curled up in my lap
Under a blanket per usual.

As I fight,
And lose,
To hold my eyes open.
We almost made it to our goal,
2am.

When we lived together,
We drank so much Cook’s -
I was still smoking then,
Blue sunrise snapshots on the back porch
Burned into my memory like hot ash.

I want to stay awake
And pour my heart right out,
To write about the time we took home that comedian
and abandoned him at poor Mark’s house
Or when your cousin died
And we got so blasted on champagne
That we fell asleep spooning in your bed.
Or when you brought me a silk rose
In the hospital
No flowers allowed (I still have it).

How can any words
Surround and capture
All of that?
And all of the moments between the moments?
The safety?

Oh Caitlin,
San Diego.

Just 4 8 hour drives
Gas stations and fields.
I’ve gone to look for America.

My lips are chapped;
The winds were high on the mountain.

The evidence of the climb smacks in the dryness and hunches in the body:
Curled in the arches of the feet, in the biceps;
roped across the shoulder blades;
crisscrossing the palms of the hands and the flanks, stippling the spine.

I sit for a long time afterward
Shivering in the car with the heat streaking the windshield.
I just sit
Staring at the windex smears where I recently tried to clean the windows-down grime of the summer.
I don’t remember how to get to your house -
The climb stripped your address from me
Like it stripped everything.

I experiment with the emergency release on my ankle
As the song Birds by Dominique Fils-Aime rises like smoke from the bottom of the car.

They find me in the morning in my front seat,
Completely flat from a slow leak in the pressure valve,
And gently cradle my head as they lift,
Out of the car and under a mountain
(Under, now)
Of softness and fragrant sweetness so I can sleep for as long as my deflated body will let me
Before it’s time again for the air compressor,
Time again, as always, to climb.

She wrote poems about sunflowers
and about the colors of each of the different flavors in her afternoon tea.

She wrote about the foot-worn path in the concrete floor of the history museum;
About a stranger’s dog who licked her hand at the park.

And to her future child,
And to the boundlessness of love she knew but could not fathom that existed in a forever-expanding space inside her,
And about that brave and resilient seed shared by all of science and art,
the interconnectedness of all things.

In radical joyful tones,
she documented the goodnesses of her Ordinary on scraps of paper and deposited them into a small chest,
her Memory Bank.

The people pointed at the lonely beergazer
The outraged wunderkind
The housebound widower
Each lost in the past or in the future.
Ah, misery.
The father of poetry.
They would shake their heads,
A shame, they would say.

Meanwhile, on the other side of town or maybe the world,
the mother of poetry, undeterred,
sat in her garden
singing to the souls of the vegetables.

It’s the anniversary today
I haven’t spent much time with it lately
Nine years of weather
Have dulled the flush of urgency.
Discolored and worn smooth from the hours spent rolling it between my palms.

Now it just is.
Vague.
An unspecified ache and not even that most of the time.

Today though.
Carefully, carefully,
I unsealed it from its resting places -
nestled in my right shoulder, cupped behind my right knee, bound to the place where my neck joins my body -
And I popped it all in my mouth at once
and chewed.
And chewed.
And c h e w e d.

God the taste
So sour, bitter, unbearable on this cleansed palette.
Salt on my face and in my mouth too
And I chewed.

The thing is, you could easily make a meal of it
And oh did I once feast on the freshness of its sharp edges, bleeding and asking,
Why does it hurt?

These days I choose to fill myself in other ways.
A person could starve on broken promises.
I can think of nothing sadder
Than ending up the only casualty of a one-man war.

From the beginning:

It’s a new year and I quit my job
**** it, I’ll never be good at serving
Directionless in 2013
January.
It’s unusually warm.

Your presence in the room is a rock in my shoe
You’re so cool
And I’m a mess.
Remember, you called me Heather in bed?
And I made you go home?
Well.
I forget.

Now we’re crossing the street
For your birthday, it’s your birthday,
Makers Mark, count ‘em, 2 ounces at a time.
Stacked up like unread texts and why don’t you like me’s
I don’t remember
But I’m probably crying

Flash in to outside
God it’s like 60
Deciding to go with you
Asking you to kiss me

(I had a long term boyfriend in my 20s
And his mother would buy me toilet paper for Christmas
The gift of hindsight is kind of like that:
Practical and helpful and a ****** of a gift)

Today is 9 years to the day
My parents know and they’re on their way
The nurse thinks I might be paralyzed
11 broken bones and two black eyes

This is the end of the beginning
Which is the easy part
I’ve never been able to write it all down
Spin it into art

Be warned, I can’t guarantee poetry
From a patched-but-still-leaking heart.

The wall
That boundary between just enough and too much
Slammed into me sometime yesterday.
The candle had burnt out and I was in the dark.
It caught me by surprise,  
And as I melted into a puddle of exhaustion
I cried out,
I’m sorry,
I swear I didn’t see this coming.

In my head, this poem is already titled.
It’s terrible practice to title a poem before writing,
at least it doesn’t do me any good -
A disorganized, stream-of-consciousness writer will be limited by a title if the title comes before the writing.

There’s a metaphor there maybe.
About deciding how things are gonna end up and adding weight,
shape,
food coloring,
substance,
meaning to your version of events without considering the infinite, tedious branches of time and meandering possibility.
We bury ourselves, is what I mean, by titling it before knowing how it goes.

Now that that’s been addressed, and stay with me because there is method here, onto the meat and potatoes of the thing:

The many flavors of goodbye.

An elusive creature, Goodbye.
You know what it is; there are examples that volunteer unbidden in our memories.

Still, even with clearly defined edges,
A goodbye wriggles out of our grasp a little
When we hold onto it too tightly.
Or it becomes cluttered, muddled with past and future partings,
When really, each goodbye belongs only to its moment and nothing and no where else.

If you’re like me, a goodbye skitters away when you look directly at it,
Leaving only a shimmering impression,
An unfulfilled opportunity to share a piece of your secret intangible insides.
If you’re like me, it hits you and slides to the ground unacknowledged, where it stays
gathering regret,
until you find it in a dusty corner one day and hold it finally to your chest,
I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.

People are ******* woefully messy,
we’re flawed and broken and vulnerable in the extreme,
Soft little mammals awake within ourselves against our will.
Doomed to loss
To pain
Fear
The unpleasant trappings of our station in abundant, endlessly accessible supply.

There’s a trick though,
They don’t tell you this,
A trick to surviving without the beating heart that you could swear lived in you too, for a blissful miraculous moment.

Ready? Let’s see if I can find the right melody; the Knowing doesn’t often lend itself to casual plainness.
People only go as far as you let them
And if we’re all waiting in line to shuffle off this blah blah blah
We can hold our goodbyes in the space where they should be, in line with us.
Not as an empty pocket of wishes and heartaches
But as the flesh and blood of our own self,
our own beating heart.

So that when those moments stun us,
Knock us backward out of our seat with unbearable force of longing, crushing in the cosmic weight of their suddenness;
when a cardinal, say, visits your mother’s old rose bushes
You can remember and unbind the reserve of space inside you
Let them walk ****** in
And sit for awhile.

The title of the poem is “On Goodbye,”
The title I prematurely chose
And the poem that followed which attempts to wrangle a wild, unyieldingly ferocious beast by treating it like a friendly stray dog.
It’s wishful, and I wish it for you, too:
That the minerals in your blood rearrange themselves into the shape a cardinal, say,
And I’ll carry you with me, too,
Until we meet again.

I hugged you after the show
My phone hadn’t been working, you were supposed to bring your drums.
It worked out okay, though - a ***, a music stand, some chopsticks.
You’ve been so distant and it was a relief to feel the beat held in your hands
as I played and sang and Karah sang the harmonies and played the tambourine.
A perfect closer.

When it was time to say goodbye, you wished me safe travels and I realized exactly how close we are to the end of this chapter.
I’m not finished reading you, I thought, feeling insane,
And hugged you so tightly it was a little embarrassing.

I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable in that moment.
You’re a difficult person to understand sometimes, I wonder if you know.

What was it like to hear the songs on their own,
Without a band?
I hope you liked them.
I wrote them all for you.

The first night we met
You showed me your guitar collection
- an impressive one -
And we played Get Together by The Youngbloods
-You on a gorgeous 12-string electric,
And me on some other guitar, I don’t remember-
for my parents and their friends and your wife Robin. Singing in harmony.
You were much better at guitar than me.

You offered me *** that night,
And I said no thanks
Not trying to be a *****.
I knew that your hips and back caused you pain and that Vicodin and red wine were a part of your diet.
But you got high anyway
And we talked about guitars.

When you came to see me play
You sang from the audience.
“A Little Help From My Friends,” I think, and
when I sang Hallelujah at the end of the night you cried, saying it was the most beautiful thing you’d every heard.
The next day, at The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, you wandered through the exhibits in reverent awe,
A cane lighting your way like a candle.

I know it hurt to walk that much
But you were determined to see all of it;
I left.
Having seen it before.
“I was on the HBO special in 2020” I told you, puffed like a rooster.
And you said that you would watch;
That I have what it takes.

“He was a big fan of yours,”
My father likes to say, like I don’t know.
A person always knows.
Your reworked Gibson a fresh addition to my own growing collection; who could pass up an SG?
Sold for nothing and only because I liked it that first night.

And now you’re gone and your wife is undone and I am so angry with you.
I wonder, would you have listened to me?
Had I reasoned with you about your health problems
The increased risk
The pros and cons?

And maybe it was your time
But maybe if you had fortified yourself against the devil you knew
By taking on the devil you didn’t
We would have had time
For one last duet.

I heard there was a secret chord that David played and it pleased the lord, but you don’t really care for music do you? It goes like this: the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall, the major lift, the baffled king composing hallelujah.

Hallelujah.
Hallelujah.
Hallelujah.
Hallelujah.

“Why don’t you try lying down, love?”

It’s 2:09 in the morning and I am wide awake.

“I’m having a hard time falling asleep without you.”

If I had one wish,
it would be that the nighttime was as acceptable as the day.
That late night or early morning trysts into the creative landscape
Was as valued and understood as daytime exploration of software development.

“I’ll finish my wine and be right there.”

Mentally patting your hand

And quietly hoping to lull you back into your contentment
That I may stay in mine.

If you are seeking
May you find what you’re looking for
And if you don’t find what you’re looking for
May you be found by what is seeking you

It’s been a prolific day
David Berman and I spent it together:

Me on his Wikipedia page,
Wondering at his language
Broken hearted over his final great collection of art,
A self-titled album released under the moniker Purple Mountains;

Him a genius
And dead
Tortured by his inability to change the world
Self loathing and addicted,
The son of a gun and liquor lobbyist who is quoted as saying, “I will miss him more than he was able to realize.”

It’s the ultra absorbent ones who make the best artists
Walking around in a store somewhere and wanting to die for the brutality of it all
Nothing brings the raw desperate animalism out from where it’s buried in the Stone Age like good old fashioned American capitalism.

(Last week I ate a gummy before going Christmas shopping and had a panic attack in a cute little boutique while buying a puzzle for my niece.
My sister-in-law told me I looked like I was seeing things
But it was the loosening of the barriers,
the flood of conflict and dissonance,
every person a song and all the songs playing at once,
tidal wave,
a cacophony of primary and secondary emotions.
This is why I don’t eat gummies).

It isn’t fair
I guess
That the ability to be so penetrated by truth isn’t beautiful
It should be beautiful
Like that shrimp, right? That can see a whole universe of colors unreachable by any other animal in existence.
An elevated understanding of truth should be like that shrimp
-The mantis shrimp, I remember now-
Truth cones like with sight…every texture and flavor of enlightenment.

In David Berman’s case, he piled substances onto the fire of his brain to ***** it out
And haven’t we all lain in a dark room on a sunny day
Haven’t we all found our habits

Instead of lamenting the curse of the truth addicted artist, as I have done most of the day,
I will tell a story
(this is true)
of my 17 year old niece Sophie
Who, when she was 9, demanded to know the Real Truth about Santa Claus.
Her friends were insistent, and she didn’t want to be left behind.

My sister, not one to mince words, told her directly and plainly,
and when Sophie asked, who then? Do you buy all of our Christmas presents every year?
again my sister gave it to her straight.

Sophie’s eyes began to swim, just as my sister suspected they might,
But when she went to comfort her daughter,
to try to convince her that magic isn’t in the elusive but in the every day
She was met with simply,

“Oh, thank you, mommy. Thank you.”

In the gas station mirror I look frayed and stringy
The word that comes to mind is “threadbare”
Which I quite like as a descriptive term, but not as an accurate appraisal of my own appearance.
Pale and too thin, wrung out, stretched, and hung up to dry.
****, I always wanted to be thin and now that I am
Turns out, I’m still me,
just thinner.

“And older. No one tells you that when you finally lose the weight, you trade in that fullness for some freshly minted crows feet, smile lines, forehead creases.”

My reflection smirks at me.

“36 and no baby, never even a scare. You know what they say, better get to it, if your insides aren’t already dust.”

Ouch. *******. I pout at my own face and the crease between my eyebrows thanks me for the job security.

A knock on the door, ah! How long have I been in here?? Feeling like an alien, I run the water for a few seconds and hastily exit,
narrowly avoiding a collision with the huffy brown parka waiting for her self evaluation.

- - -

I wonder where it states in the Gas Station Code of Interior Decoration
That all gas station bathrooms must douse each user in the inevitability of their own mortality,
cast in green from the regulation fluorescents.

Predawn is the most underrated time of day, if you ask me
Blurry lines and street signs
Cast in hazy yellows and oranges from the burning sodium vapor in the street lamps
That iconic suburban glow,
Stark against the impenetrable blueblack sky and all the mysterious silhouettes cut jaggedly against it.

(A staggering feat, to beat back the darkness. Humanity.)

The pavement shines bright gold - must have rained - fading to bronze,
rose,
purple,
finally disappearing into nothingness,
a question mark.

Pillbox houses,
neat rows in every direction,
squat mutely,
some with their own brief reach of a lamp in the window or the warm assurance of a porch light -
Even the occasional sharp cough of a security spot,
high beams razor white,
primed for each raccoon and every vague, faceless fear.

“We never thought it could happen here.”

Ah, but the unsalted dough of the middle class is a subject for the afternoon

This is the royal Morning’s expectant hour.
She wanders eternally,
accompanied only by her barefoot unrest, bathing the earth in her wealth of unspent moments,
untold riches of possibility streaming from the many secret folds concealed within the depths of her ermine cloak.

(Am I hopeful or fearful of the coming day? Are the paltry occupations of one electrified grain of stardust worth a thousand words?)

The flat sleepy windows of the sleepers and the risers,
grumbling caffeine addicts and early birds, night owls with their midnight oil long spent,
dreamer and seekers lost on the astral plane and the merry punching rumble of the bustling workforce’s well-rehearsed choreography hold court over this rarest domain,

while the Fates, ever watchful, hand select the paths to put before us.  
Each choice a thread.
Each decision a stitch.

It may surprise you to know that I feel sorry for you.

Yes.
You.

With your gigantic shadow,
Punishments fresh on your tongue
for any unfortunate friend or foe or relative
Who happens to wander across your path and blunders instead upon Vesuvius

You

Ever the open wound,
the heavy hand.
So much resentment to stoop beneath

it must be exhausting.

The cuts on your forehead so deep
The ****** of the sentinel’s spear
You’d have everyone believe they’re real.

I’m sorry to tell you
That every vicious blow and blown blackjack hand dealt:
blow backs from your own blustering
By which those fingers cast the first stone,
That voice eagerly weeps
and gleefully moans
Oh cruelty, oh woe!

You,
The alpha and the omega
The House and the player

I feel sorry for you
and your blindness,
That no one will ever speak up,
but instead will silently watch you run into walls.
You’ve conditioned us all,
As we watch you lay the bricks,
To take the blame for your bruises.

It’s a shame, too.
You have such beautiful gemstone eyes

And yet,
as any professional would tell you,

they lack clarity.

Ida!

What a name
From another world, you are.

It’s still your house, Ida.
Like all the **** I sold to manage this move,
All that **** is still
Mine…in a way…if you consider things to be infused with the life of the owner,
Which I do.
That Holy Grail, for instance,  gave me extended foot problems
From kicking the switch in the soft middle of my socked foot during every band practice at Karah’s house.
No shoes allowed.

So my foot injury now lives as a legacy in that pedal, even though my pipe fitter buddy bought it from me as his first pedal.
(He has money and real deal gear and I feel kind of sad for him that he’ll miss the experience of hacking away on a $300 setup with borrowed effects.)


So right we all get the metaphor, it’s one I use often, that we leave ourselves behind wherever we go.

And Ida, your pink appliances and your pink tile and your pink wallpaper
Well
It makes me
Glad
To know you.

We can share this home, this stake you drove into your own heart in 1960.
I’m glad you got to die here, Ida
Amidst your pink at 98.

I like pink too.
I do hope that if your spectral expression decides to reveal itself to me,
That it is to give me tips on how best to preserve the pink enamel sink
And not to box my ears for snapping the light switch
Instead of placing it.

The air is magic
In the same way a human nervous system is divinely inspired by tree roots

As tree roots seek other tree roots to bind to, sharing nutrients and information underground in secret tongues lost to time (but not to trees),
So too does the nervous system talk to our various insides,
electricity and fat and water and blood,
mysterious even to us as we haphazardly propel ourselves through space,
a mess of actions and reactions.

Magic

In the same way that time exists only because death exists
And death exists both because of and in spite of time.

And I am alive.

(If you ever doubt yourself, remember the incredible odds you overcame just to become).

Months maybe, a year?
We were unmasked in your home or mine,
Or on a walk
Or texting our words into knitted ropes that became our strength and our life line
And you said
“I never realized how connected we all are. That every moment spent with others, I am breathing their breath. We’re sharing breath, all of us, all the time.”

Oh.
Oh. Yes.
Lashes of breath like lizard tongues
Forked and solid and hot
Plunging and coiling;
Ariel losing her song.

(I carry this with me still, like I carry the threat of the possibility of blood drying in the veins, crystallizing there.)

A sharing of totems, airborne on the exhale, between the vastness of humanity.
Maybe it’s a
Heart,
feather,
child,
guitar string,
equation,
pet,
sense memory

- a bit of mustard,
a crumb of cheese -

a shame,
a secret,
an illness,
a loss,
a hope,
a flame,
a diary entry,

a passage in a story that is so written on your DNA that your ancestors will possess its truth and sacredness,

Not ******, but nakedness.

The unknowable intricacies that terraform the gallery walls of every life ever lived,
Each of us a cavern sprawling brimming with a trail mix of escaped fragments of other souls, nestled among our own wreckage and music and roots of trees.

This invisible connection to each other,
so wrought now, warped and vivid
against the sky.  
Drawing breath as drawing sword,
building blocks as barriers built,  
We are withdrawing from each other in our sick rooms,
dosed on breath from birth,
suddenly forced into thickened singularity for an easier swallow, weighted heavy on the chest.
Oh I know, it’s the X-ray blanket at the dentist when you were a kid
It’s Ian’s sweaty shaking hand during that first detox, 20 bars deep, wanting to tell him that I ******* told you so, I TOLD you. Knowing that no one’s voice would ever be louder than his own.

You look at me,
And I’m losing you.
I see it like bitterness on your lips
But I don’t mind.
You’re right, I’m exhausted too.
I wish I was better at being frank.
How, though, to make sense of this new world if not to drag the old world into it?
How to point and name and say “this is”
When all you know is what it is not?

Forbidden night, with your sheltered hours.
How I long to paint you in broad strokes, adding water to the brush,
That you may spread and extend your precious mercies beyond the borders of your designation,
up and out into the wicked day.

May the sun forgive me for bankrupting its grand offering in favor of the always-waning dark, when it’s easier to walk between worlds without touching.
Daylight brings out the conquerers and also the conquered,
creating a vacuum that devours the air between gaps in the dimensions,
the grind and squeeze of many lungs contracting at once.

And although every period of light and compression is followed by a period of darkness and grasping strangeness, I am never unsurprised by the strength of my enduring love nor less enchanted by the singularity of our shadowy and permissive embrace. I have traveled great lengths to con my own rhythms into abandoning  their posts.

Oh night, I hold on to you like a new bride at a military wedding,
resolute in the knowledge that you will only return once you’ve already gone.
No sooner do you pull from my arms do I finally rest, too early and too late for a gentle landing onto the unforgiving surface of the sunrise.  

the hourglass breaks and so appears Morpheus, great and ancient, to call down black night upon the wretched world.
For it was agreed that once per cycle, the world must lose itself in necessary madness, and thus rests the cosmic balance upon which fares the day

Is there anything more pure
Than a dog who curls up at your side
And leans her sweet meaty head against you
And falls asleep,
Dreaming her dreams as she snores?

A studied and precise move,
(the snoring is key for peak adorableness) clinically proven to woo your human into giving you a bite of her dinner.

I read a beautiful poem once by a poet named Mary Oliver
(My uncle will tear out pages of The New Yorker sometimes and keep them in a box  the way some people of a certain age do)
called The Poet With His Face in His Hands.

“You want to cry out for your mistakes,” she says rightly and wisely, “But to tell the truth the world doesn’t need any more of that sound.”

Mary Oliver tells me (she has my attention now, she speaks directly to me, my face in my hands) that if I’m going to do it anyway, that I should travel far away from civilization where I won’t bug anyone, a noisy place, like a waterfall or the Internet, where I can scream unheard, a tree falling in the forest. Where I can “drip with despair” unobserved by nature her very self.

Mary Oliver doesn’t want to hear it.

So I go.
I take my hiking boots and my entire supply of shame, guilt, rage, doubt,
Fear
I slip it all into a secret compartment just behind my ribs
And we set off together past the city limits to the wastes.
They’re crushing me, the wretched fruit of my faulty design. Too heavy to go on tonight.

I quietly wish Mary Oliver had never been featured in The New Yorker where my uncle would find her, where she would mildly wait for me to crash into her on my world tour of destruction.
I wonder into my dinner
(beans, like cowboys)
if Mary Oliver ever trekked to the waterfall, if I’ll find her there,
an etching, a manifesto.
I imagine myself stepping through, somber, monk-like, and Mary Oliver’s glowing apparition slowly gathering before me.
“You’re so cool and smart,” her energy-being murmurs,
and I wake up feeling important.

Cleveland is so grey in the winter,
my grandmother’s favorite color,
like that song.
The morning sky rides my shoulders and I feel deliciously tragic,
a broken-hearted pioneer woman, maybe, escaping into the wilderness to mourn the loss of her baby…****, too sad.

…to mourn the loss of her old mule Hank, and to find herself among the…
I look around. Generic Cleveland Trees. ****.
I wish I knew about local foliage,
everyone is impressed by a person who is At One With Nature.
I would know if I were a tragic yet somehow glowing from within pioneer woman. Head down, wondering how it can be 53 degrees on December 10th and trying not to think about the polar bears.
I soldier on.

Mary Oliver recommends traveling 40 fields and 40 dark inclines of rocks and water.
(A sweeping arial shot of me traversing the expanse, majestic hair blowing behind like Vigo Mortenssen at Helm’s Deep).

Beans again, like cowboys.

I feel good tired and wonder where a person finds quality poetic landscape like 40 fields and 40 dark inclines of rocks and water.

I didn’t really think this through.

An itch, a burn behind my ribs,
like stars,
like cravings.

A peek.

Just one! Just one, Mary Oliver,
just a ****,
they’ve been in there for days with so little attention.

No one answers, inevitably.
No one’s there, just me, always just me, alone with all of my worst days in the dark in the woods.  

Just one peek.

I wake up and its bright as hell.
What the ****.
What is the point of trees if they don’t dramatically block out the sun at your lowest moment?
The sun.
I squint and automatically say a little thank you,
the sun is so rare in the winter.
A ritual in the cold light.

I flash in, awash with readiness
It’s sudden
Something is coming or something was here but my stomach hollows out like a fake-out gut punch

Was here
Something was here, last night, it’s surrounding me on all sides
Yes that’s right, I remember and Im sorry for the remembering because I’m creative
and before I can stop myself
I’m swallowed whole into the darkness
Just like I wanted.

It’s a struggle,
The swirling absence of light from last nights indulgent, masochistic self-harm parade has expanded like smoke to fill the third space of my body. I am 2 dimensional, a 3rd grade drawing of a person, flat and scribbley, a poor representation.

They always come back.
Sure as eggs.
Sure as taxes.
The greatest hits, everyone was there,
Ripe and healthy,
My well tended heirloom misery, dismal in the garden and aching to stretch its creeping vines.
A vessel to feed on, a disciple,
Bleeding on the alter of self sacrifice, oh happy dagger, ecstatic drag over the open mouths of those cherry coals. Faithless and perfect. Crimson crisp is a broken spirit,
Brittle like nails, and sleep, and ego.

My friends, too, wars within wars. Pale and desperate. Trauma-bonded and aging faster than their parents did, who bought a house, who had three kids, who saved for college. Wars within wars. Shame, guilt, rage, doubt, fear. Pain. So much pain.

I’m lost.
I’m lost in the ******* woods and this poison smoke so black so black it’s in my eyes burning my throat my lungs swirling now sure as eggs sure as taxes I repent I release my will please it’s crushing me I can’t make it Mary Oliver, you shining city on the hill, where are you, Im losing, Im alone, alone, no one knows
Not a cowboy, or a pioneer, or a ranger, or a monk in a waterfall cave.

I’m a poet with my ****** face in my hands.
I’M THE POET WITH MY FACE IN MY HANDS AND I WILL NOT FEAR CRYING ALOUD FOR MY MISTAKES.

They come then. Every one of them, as I knew they would, just outside the gate and waiting ravenously  
My endless flaws  
Powerful and obstinate in their glaring humanity
The constellations of hurt snaking from the roots of my well kept garden
Barbed and bound to everyone I ever loved. The horned monsters of unresolved trauma and the ego machine

Deafening static roar, mechanical swarm of devouring plague locusts
descending upon the 40 fields
Oh here, oh now
In the dark of course
Where else but the smoking vessel of my brokenness
I want to laugh at myself for constructing a cliche within my own self reckoning
Choking on my own toxic exhaust and crying  and choking
This is hysteria, I think
Blurred and muffled on the edge of the hole, a ******* slurring descent, it’s there if I want it
I could dive in and

Mary Oliver.

What is happening,
What the ****, Mary Oliver?
Of whom I’ve never seen a photo,
who is crowning now from the bubbling tar pit, who has chosen this  moment to reveal herself, a nice touch.
She rises from the epicenter of my chaos
Like a blinding beacon of holographic light
(Again I check in with myself that it’s weird she is holographic, why is she made of rainbows)
Beautiful and terrible and 10000 feet high
My mighty dragon. What an entrance.

I laugh again, of course Rainbow Bright  is my big bad, how did I not see this coming, the final girl against the final girl, myself against my greatest self betrayal
She is me
She is arbitrary denial
She is suppression and avoidance
She is vying for approval
For attention
Validation
Every embarrassing moment and every unbidden 3am attack of self loathing.  
Shame and guilt and doubt and rage and fear.
She is my pain, this awful manifestation, this truly depressing personification of all of my absolute *******…

MARY OLIVER I AM THE POET WITH MY HEAD IN MY HANDS

Blink

Blink blink

She turns and sweeps down
And grabs me tightly, ****, oh god you have a nest dont you?

Through the air and I’m wet and dripping and…
is this a cave?

An etching, I have to find something
Something
A manifesto
I desperately search and my teapot is boiling, boiling, boiling over

And there behind that jubilation and water fun
I find no trace of Mary Oliver, who is me and I am her

There in that moment when nothing has been gained and my body begins to release from its own tension and collapse into itself from exhaustion and despair
I notice the air
Fresh and cool and fragrant and something else too
My dragon, far from slain, squirming a little inside me, feeling prodded and suspicious of this quenching.
At least we had this moment
Oh it’s you
Oh god it’s me

And finally then,
I throw my head back

And wail.

Metallic pinging behind my right ear
Reminds me
That this
Is the first quiet moment
I’ve experienced all day

Feeling the rain more than hearing it
6:24 dark and threatening
It’s so cold in this ******* basement

2 hours and 36 minutes away
Crouching in plain sight
The work day.

Delivering food for the food bank, which is punk as **** frankly,
It’s a wasteland out here
And people need to eat

(A human right, if I understand the constitution correctly. Happiness is a lost pursuit in a body that’s hungry. You say food is a privilege <yes, you said it and believed it>, I say it’s life and liberty.)

Two 15 pound bags at a time
In exchange for baggage a mile high
Stacking cred against labor to build tone in your thighs

My joints wonder how young I think I am
Remembering the time my leg seized up and that old man just stared until I saw him see me and I smiled, I’m so silly

Hurry before all this pain ripens to taste
Slug it down like tequila
Try not to make a face
Born at the finish line, running in place.

2 hours and 26 minutes to make the coffee and absorb the caffeine
While I’m still me
And there’s nothing else to be

There’s a certain blurry gentleness to denial
A Tylenol bottle cotton plug of protection
Muting the inevitable rattling,
A scratchy puff, a cloud,
Shoving it down into the bottle
Until it’s wedged Somewhere Else
now just a half a whisper you can almost hear
On a tv with no subtitles

I like it here.
Swaddled against such unpleasantness
Nestled and unfocused.
That’s the key.
Focus your attention on anything for too long and you’re *******
The spell will be broken
That little whisper
Now a shard of glass
Now unforgiving and sharp edged on your naked awareness

Now, it insists
Now
Hear me NOW

NO, ****!
So many wishes spill out when you lose,
The blood of your unreason stinging your eyes like black pepper
Like a floodlight in a dark room
Pluck it out or shove it down
It will find a way to find you
Outside or inside you
In front of or behind you

You can’t escape this time
Or can you?

If you sink to the bottom you can hide awhile
With the anchor on your ankle
And the waves on every side caressing, pressing oh so gently
Like a kiss, like a smile.

Bliss endless and tidal
Like denial.

It was unexpected
I can’t be expected to be right all the time
I said
And poured another glass of wine
It was reasonable
I reasoned
That I should have more

Are you feeling it are you feeling it?
It’s the ghost girl in the bathroom
It’s the dreams and screams and half moon
It’s the ghost girl in the tide pool
Are you feeling it?

Did you pass out
Or fall asleep in the deep end
Are you holding onto defense
Are you holding on at all?
So much blue in this ocean
They said it would be green
Its blue
I’m through with you
I’m through

Are you feeling it, are you?
It’s the ghost girl in the bathroom
It’s the meaning that escapes you
It’s the ghost girl in the tide pool
Are you feeling it?

I can cross my eyes
In the middle of the night
I can’t be expected to always be alright

What’s your problem?
Is it so bad you have to run
Run away
Run away as fast as you can?
You’re already so gone
Gone
A stranger’s eyes have found a home inside your weary head

Deep inside you
The city burns
I don’t know what it is about this place
That everybody
Seems to be fine just killing time until the end of days

Sleep to forget
Sleep to dream about anything
Anything at all
Sleep will save you
From all the monsters that await your waking like the executioner awaits the gavel’s fall

What’s your problem?
Is it so bad you have to
Lock
Lock yourself away in your dreams?

Count your heartbeats
As long as you’re inside this cage
You will never know what it is to be free

We are all mothers
As we care for one another while going about business as usual
Our greatness in the guidance of the women whose scalloped hands stirrup our feet in the rooms and halls and roads of our lives
Who we notice only when we focus our eyes on our own faces, on our own working hands, on our own burdened hearts.

It’s the early morning that does it for me

I don’t mean to seek it
But I am sought in these quiet empty-full hours -
All or nothing out-with-the-bath-water seclusion.

(Delusions of liqueur
cocksure
Every flavor of azure)

Oh god what I would give to extend the great expanse of 4am, ribbon slick and taut as a ******

And me, warm and creative.

It’s the early morning that does it for me

I’m staying up with a song.

-Call-

Respond

Eyes and lips and abandoned ships
Mirages of **** below long, fluted throats
Gliding between notes
and me too

Ready to drown you.

(It’s the early morning that does it for me)

As you give yourself over to the caresses of the mistress
and dream of flying over perfect fields of wheat

and then land

and then wake

≈furrowed≈

disappointed to find
a cold pillow where a head should be asleep

I release my held breath and meet you
Half way

I was singing
I say
And collapse in a heap

Wet hair
Bare feet
It’s dawning and day

Closing my eyes
Sunset at sunrise
Holding onto a secret key

I dream of the sea