And this,
Is of all and anything...

Little girls wear too much makeup
Pre-teens, children
Everyone shaves or waxes their genitals
**** and **** "jobs"
Are commonalities
The fridge repair man came today
Cash, or *******?
I'm not sure,
***** stamped,
on makeup
My five year old worries about her hair,
Style and colour
She asks questions
I can't answer
My therapist
Charges too much,
Feeling too much
Six figure income,
And paying only less,
Than five dollars a day,
In child support
Husbands, locking up wives
And getting by,
Mothers, stripping
To make ends meet
No judgement here
Not that I could,
Nor, that I ever would
Thinking about,
In trash cans
Where real souls dwell
Infections of the uninsured,
All's well
I swear.....
This is
Of ALL and EVERYTHING.

It is hard to say when she started disliking the
Girl in the mirror.
It was probably about the time they gave her braces.
Surely, she began to take only glances
When she got pimples her hair wouldn’t cover
Try as she did with different lengths and styles.

The worst of it started when her friends began
To round out and she stayed all lines and angles,
Like a child among young women discovering themselves.

It drove her inside herself,
Further from her friends, one of whom
Struck a devastating blow when the Girl overheard
Herself called a pimply stick
Just so a boy of dubious morals would laugh.

She started hanging the towel on her mirror then.
She told her mother it dried better that way.
The woman accepted this
And so the Girl in the mirror locked herself away.

Mirrors cannot show the heart or wit
Or the steadfast love within.
There is only the reflection of beauty soon gone
And cast aside for that.

If only the Girl could see beyond the pale reflection.

Some nights I stand at the deck rail
To watch the day burn out across the lake.
Behind me darkness devours the remnants of the
Waking world; transforming what we know
Into things we fear.

The waves, here all my lifetime,
Are gone leaving only the
Growl and hiss of an angry, unseen beast.

The flaccid light of the moon is no help
As it sends shadows like twisted beings from
A nightmare racing from structures
I thought could be trusted.

Even the wind blows colder, sending a shiver
Down my back as I stand tense in the belly of the night

I think, therefore I am not digested by night…
Unless the morning fails, as one day it must.
I hope this is not be what the endless will be,
I want what the nuns promised.

She should have been fine,
Right school, good family, right color,
But she was at the age when things go wrong.

She began to feel the weight
Of weightless things
And the need to be someone
No one could be outside the cover of a magazine.

So the doubt crept in and
Muddied her image in the mirror
Then frustration took hold
Because she couldn't reach a
Place that never was
Or ease the pain of that failure.

One bad day, the devil whispered
Through the mouth of a boy who knew her pain
In his hand a pill, he said,
“It's cool, everybody does”.

But she heard through tortured adolescent thoughts  
“Here is peace, acceptance is here, belonging “.

And so she did and did
And when she tried to turn away
The whisper became a shout, then a command
And the pill became a needle in her arm.
  
When money ran out, she started selling
Pieces of her soul in backseats, or ***** hotels.
The devil left her then, he had won.
No more promises, no dreams, or hopes or even fears
Only the need for something
No one ever needed.

Her world became an illustration
She maintained with just enough sense
To keep her on the street, but
It wasn't enough in the end.

Her mother found her in her bed
Afterward the woman always said
“She looked so peaceful and
So young. “My little girl “.

Somewhere the devil whispered,
“Peace” and laughed.

The fog came in and cut the hard edges off Monday morning,
Which really didn't do much good because a cold rain
Fell through it and soaked down to my soul.

It is the kind of day when reality bends and
The big questions beg for answers,
Like where does the spark go when it leaves?

I mean we turn out the lights, but the beam travels
Endlessly, the fastest thing we know, to the end
Of what?

The universe?  Time? (Whatever time means compared to eternity)

So, the light in our eyes, where does it go when the power is cut?
Or am I supposed to accept, Dr. Hawking, the light we make
Rubbing two sticks together is superior to the light in us because we
Can't yet find the formula for sentience or measure
It's limits beyond what we can see?

Big questions, foggy, rainy Monday and I am alone
A week after the light went out in dad.

I expect he’s out past Jupiter by now, heading home.

He’s also right beside me, I can feel him, thank God.