Vocabulary
is, yes, rather impressive.
No one gives a ****.

There's butter in my coffee
I heard that it fills you up in the morning
It's the fat, they say, that sustains you.

The problem is, I haven't eaten in, oh,
19 hours or so,
And this buttery coffee is making me feel funny.
Like, nostalgic,
Plegic at the kitchen table
Staring at the new paisley tablecloth without being able to think about anything.

This house has a voice and it's making me tired listening to it scream all day.
Only a month and already I'm pushing away
You can tell, you keep trying to kiss me awake but I can't hear you over the house.
They say this is what happens, so I never tried until now.
You really see a person, they say.
And I can tell you are really seeing me for the first time in these three years,
And it's making you nervous that maybe I'm actually not okay.

Maybe I'm not.
This behavior isn't normal, I guess, I mean most people eat and sleep at regular intervals
And share themselves
And do their chores
And go to work in the morning
And live a life that resembles something.

And now you're really noticing.
Normal behavior hasn't ever really been my "thing."
But writing songs to the tune of your own heartbeat isn't the way to make other people sing.

You didn't stay at the party,
Even though it was at your house
and you can still hear laughter coming from the living room.

You didn't stay at the party
You fled like a mouse
from the prey of the cat that you hoped would leave soon.

But it's five in the morning
God, you're so ******* boring

But the boy with the ukelele
Is still serenading the lady
Who has absolutely no interest
In becoming his mistress.

I'm writing this poem
because there's no way I'm a-goin
to sleep any time soon.

So you get to hear me comploon.

Complain.

It's 5 in the morning.

I've gone insane.

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

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

I get sleepy, but

if I let sleep greet me, the

giant will eat me.

God.

God.

God ******

*******

I never asked for fair.
never.

I never once asked for care.
never.

And yet.
AND YET.

It's there.

The lever.

Yes,
as common as a spare tire in my trunk.

As brazen as a soldier, pacing his bunk.

The persecuted party was drunk as ****.

WAS DRUNK WAS DRUNK WAS DRUNK

AS ****

If the weak and the quiet
suddenly stop
to face the consequence
does it much
matter to the JUDGE and the JURY, the JUDGEMENT and Such?

Has the world run amok?

Has the world run amok?

Stories!

Thousands. A thousand thousand thousand.

All misremembered together,
A plethora of memories of memories

- that's what they say, when you have a memory it's of the last day you had the same memory -

on and on forever,
a treasury of pleasure and grief and madness and drunk sadness
floating like leaves
through the air.

And it's not fair
That you get to have them
Because you're home
And I don't
And I'm not
And I feel all alone.

My blood is thin today
It steams in the chilly humid air as it
Streams like water from a small cut on my toe.
Its red is shocking,
like paint on the black tar back patio.

"Sleep is for the weak"
They say.

And while sleeping is, I admit, my weakness
Today is still yesterday and my blood is streaming like water from this little painful cut.

And in my gut I know that it's not sleep nor pain that makes a person weak

But the ability to admit to both

again

and again

and again

Without the ability to know when it's time to admit defeat.

Music.

It's within. Without.

We share it with everyone. We hide what it's about.

We protect our privacy. We let it all hang out.

We want it, oh how we want it all, it all defines us until we find the wall.

The wall! What a joke. We're all in on the farce. Just give us your music, we'll decide what is art. Just sell us your soul, we'll take it from here. Have another beer, we have plenty, my dear. You're valuable, oh yes, just keep your thumb on the pulse. Drink up and polish your gift of schmaltz.

But it's false. It's all false. It's the ******* waltz,  our partner keeps face while we're falling apart, and then kicks us aside when we're behind in the race. We're falling apart, we're floating in space.

I want this to have a happy ending. If you ever hear one, its ******* worth defending. Keep me in mind. I've got music for spending. Together we've got the means for the mending.

Look around and tell me, who’s happy?
Isn’t happiness the goal above all?
Or rather to avoid feeling sorry
For ******* away the springtime in spite of the fall?

You're so floppy.
Like a puppy,
all arms and feet
gangly, knobby.

We sit together
to work on work
but nothing gets done
it's all just talk,

Just stories about grandpas
from World War II
Freedom of love
Religious views.

And through it all
in your attentive eyes
I can see your heart
And can see how wise
You are for sixteen
And I'm twenty-nine
so that makes thirteen
years between us, christ.

I hope I see you down the line
Ten years, or twenty
And you're still just...fine
I fear for you in this terrible place
It's unkind to a gentle mind
It can shut down an open space.

But it feels like nothing
Could create a person
Not years or experience
With such clarity of vision
And depth of innocence
As you showed me today
Under the tent where we spent the day.

I believe in you.
And in who you'll become
You've already got the glue
Now you just need some
Confidence, but it's ok to be green
When the world is bright
And you're barely sixteen.

Lord grant me the audacity.

To again be a 23 year old marshmallow
Partying every night at the campfire with a bunch of skewers.

The audacity
To feel outstanding
With an underdeveloped frontal lobe
Floating around in cherry bombs and Stroh’s

To survive being invincible and brave and strong enough to make bold and terrible decisions
And blessedly wake to another sunrise

Never grateful to be alive.
******* *****.
How does anyone survive their early 20s.

Sheer audacity.

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's floating and falling at once. There's no footing, but still a softness that eases the passing hours. If tomorrow is a problem, it's tomorrow's problem as I sink into a perfect nowness that extends beyond the reach of time.

It's dark out here under the cloudy half moon. We sit comfortably in silence serenaded by the popping drops of leftover rainwater careening to their next place of rest. They'll surely be gobbled up by the cracks or the ******* air or the perfect flow of water right down the drain and out to the rivers and the lakes of the many.

Alone with the smokey dark, so unlike the music of the forest songs in the old home that now belongs to some other child who might be wondering at my initials in the long dried concrete. What ever became of the small strange hands that cast their delicacy immortal on that casual day one summer, one year, so far away from the tiny reach of these brand new fingers?

Don't stand on the big fan, child, or try to fly by lifting your long skirt just enough to feel the hot billows underneath. Wait (oh the waiting!) for the hand of god to fill your body with balloons, and only then will you rise straight up and up and up till the farthest star is a blaring blot behind you on the white black sky.

Sit  there with the moon then and ask your secret questions. The answers in your swollen heart will sing like the cicadas clinging the trees and the jungle air will float you home on a cloud in the breeze.

There are veins
Arteries
That connect my heart to the rest of me
Something so vain to plainly see
Your heart exists floating free



Ooohs and aahs

I've never been the kind to shy
Away from another's mistake
And the clouds that live in my house were just another obstacle to shake
But there's only so much a tree can take
And my bows bent so low that I'm ready I'm ready to break
I'm ready I'm ready to break
I'm ready I'm ready to break

The clouds

lift

with a perspective shift.

Accept the gift.

Irrevegant scapegoat with uncooked beliefs sheaths his knife when he finds the doubts he worked so hard to bury.

The words don't carry that weight anymore, he mused, and laughing aloud at the faces of the brandy-plied crowd he turns on his heel and vanishes into the rain.

We watch this, silent as only a stunned mass can be when faced with eternity, then turn to each other to mutter low-murmered threats about the night and the sight we'd just beheld.

A special time for all, as we sink back into hell.

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.

There's a brand new world
A new universe that doesn't include me. I try.

I try.

And it's not their fault.


There's a brand new soul.
A new universe the doesn't include you. I try.

I try.

And it's not your fault.

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.

It's not so much the giving. That's living, the burst from your heart that connects to the hive mind; the leaving all the doubt behind.

It's the after. Exhausted and shattered and sweating out all your exposed emotions, and nothing. No word, no glance, as you stuff all your **** back into the red suitcase that contains your world and no one else's.  

There's no expectation for commendation, but you wish someone would attempt some relation as you mop up the ****** mess that once was beautiful, but is now splendorless.

Music is useless for making a statement. The whole world is trying to make you complacent and you'd smash your guitar, but your money's all spent so you cry in your bed wishing you were a poet (or a surgeon or a botanist or at least brilliant) instead.

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.

There.

Are.

Horrible.

Things.



You.

Are.

Responsible.  

For.


No.

One.

Knows.


The.

True.

Meaning.

of

Regret.

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 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.

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

The air is heavy with a million million souls
Parts of wholes that escaped in the breaths of prayers
Whispered at windows of the desperate and the faithful
In the apple-core-rot towns and cities of America.

I’m standing in my driveway
And I can feel them all,
Bearing down like storm clouds in the heat.
Another offering could bring the heavens crashing to my feet.

My forehead is sweating, standing there in my driveway,
And I wipe it with the back of my hand,
Squinting into the haze.
The waves of energy
Their ecstatic mass vibrating, buzzing, clicking
A dog’s toenails on linoleum  
A tiny ear pressed to a mother’s chest as she hums. A heartbeat.

I feel dizzy
and wonder if the entirety of the universe
is made of the hopeful, wasted energy of unanswered prayers

I will dig a deep well inside myself to deposit the seeds of doubt, I say to myself and no one and the universe,
and despairing for the orphaned dreams surrounding me,
I give in to the indulgence of wishing.

The sky sags under the weight of a new plea
As I prepare to forget

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.”

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.

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.”

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.