Mother those dead people in the books
Who pen tragedy, brew empathy in a whisk of their words
Seem to understand me better than you do
And to think they say mothers
Have intuition
As razor sharp as your mouth
For someone with so much ability
You fail at seeing nearby distances

No I will not become a mother
Like yourself
I refuse to believe a world
That doubts me as I am
I am a woman
And they see me as less than a man
How absurd my fictional mother
Maya Angelou made me think
I was more

Read Sylvia Plath if you could just
Maybe you'll hear the voice of my soul
Which you have rightly marked
By your own answers
No I will keep wearing
Worn out sneakers and dip them
In mud once in a while
Also, I do not want anyone
To tell me my femininity
Is anchored on fair complexion,
Rose red lips that open
Only to say yes
Because it is not mother dear

You see I have learned a lot from pain
To understand that what is good is
people as they are and were
I have learned enough from a curse
That lives within me
(And which you dont seem
to comprehend)
That I believe in myself
No matter how much
Broken bones lie beneath me
I've died so many times mother
But I lived again and again
To be mad, to be absolutely
irrevocably insane
Headfirst, a marked man
But nevertheless alive
Before those who tell me
I am a nonexistence.

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring'd with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.

The house, when empty,
feels like a moseleum.
Everything is dark.
It is strange, how literally I can feel the heart tear.
Pericardium and myocardium,
ripping with the slow, tough **** of time and waiting,
atrium and ventricle split.
Far away my brain turns in on itself
as I stare at the candy on the road,
left from a Christmas parade,
Defined by the things its left behind,
though they lie unwanted.

My soul has fled to the wilderness
birth pangs of grief beginning,
prepared to deliver a stillborn heart,
As another star falls out of my sky.

It will go dark, I know.
One by one fall, without wishes to bring them back.
I stare at my sister's golden hair
and dread the day when she will be the one lying white,
bloodless
in a hospital bed.
Oh my mother, Oh my father,
are you to fall away, too?

Light. I scream, I need light.
But I will not throw bits of glass at the sky
to pretend I have re-lit the stars.

This is an eastward trek on repeat.

                                             A tape cloaked in static,
    clicking and turning over itself.

A departed decade's daydream
                                     whirling towards Lands of Plenty.

                                                         With nebulas dot dot dashing into Eternity,
eyes are locked on the horizon as plasmic ghouls
             gravitate and spindle from a restless breeze.

                                                                     Why probe
                                                                     another world;
                                 Let the space jazz
                                 lose your mind;
Slide down the
Wormhole
as asteroids
light the Moon?

In the zone, everything begins to shine.
                                                                          Feel goods
                                                                 engrained
                                                         in verbal tides.
                                                        A tale
                                     abundant
in
sweet illumination.

When I close my eyes,
I see a serene aquatic view
and messages in bottles growing
smaller and smaller,
melting into the horizon.

I see the Sun
catching the glass' delicate curvatures
and casting amber sparkles
back to the shore where I
stand firmly
in the sand.

For two hundred and forty six sunrises,
the hungry tides
swallowed and buried my feet over and over again
as they cast themselves upon me.
I remained
unmoved
as twilight waxed and waned.
When soft pinks, oranges, and yellows were weakened
with the onset of a deep indigo,
a longing for night
festered
and ****** me into its mesmerizing abyss.
When a single gull's call pierced the sky
his lonely cry called me
to find solace in isolation.
And as the ocean oohed and awed over a cool breeze,
I let it run through me
and did not shudder
from its ghost-like impulse.

I feel the waves grabbing at me to pull me in,
and
I want to give in to their force.
I want them to carry me away.
I want to feel their shifts in energy, and
I want to float atop them
as the Sun shines upon me and warms my face.
I'm longing to be carried to lands not quite breached
on any wave
that would be willing
to take me...

Anywhere.

But I am still
motionless.
Cemented
in ever moving grains.
Forever sinking down into the sand
unable to attain the fluidity
that is
the Sea.

Fuchsia butterflies dancing south
of opulent skies
signify yet another year
has come and passed;

There is nothing left for no one
but a crystal kiss upon these rolling hills;

The colors on the horizon
drained of flesh,
the bourbon in this stained mug
licked away,
and the messy red curls
atop my head
lay in piles
on the floor.

Ringing static
undisturbed,
an ocular void
resides in the mirror

The years have not been very kind to you. You look older than your 26 years, haggard, cracked. Your hair is close cut, but you're nearly bald now. You once said it was from stress, but I remembered the genes carry from a mother's father, and I almost ask, then remember you never knew your mother. The only grandfather you can remember was cruel and drunk, and poured whiskey on a beetle while your uncles laughed. Your eyes are still those of a frightened child, a well-like soul, lit with some insane fire. You're thinner than I remember, but still not thin enough to fit into your dress blues. Where are they now, I wonder? Probably in the house that never felt like home, sheathed in plastic, smelling of cigarette and marijuana smoke. You're smoking again. I watched you leaning against your old truck, talking to someone, flicking the **** into the grass. I entertain the idea of stopping to speak to you, some primal urge of a broken heart. The broken heart that isn't sure if it still loves you, or your memory, split and driven by the reminder that some things simply aren't meant to be, no matter what the books say.
My heart leaps to race again, like a frightened rabbit, unsure where to go, or what to do. Going back was never an option. I turn away.
At work I glance in the bathroom mirror, I am very pale. You don't frighten me, but there is some storm which has blow up, confused, convoluted with time and the gilding of memory. I remember you fondly, if that is any consolation.
I told someone how I loved you, and he asked, half mocking, if I would go and find you. It stung. He was jealous, maybe. He'd already given me flowers, though with promises of friendship, unlikely more. He and I don't speak much now, and it hurts. You and I, another story. We spoke once a year, twice maybe. Always ending with the same scabs tearing off, the same regrets, the same pleading from you, and the same apologies from me as to why it is so impossible for us to relight the drowned kindling that once kept us warm.
We walked such different paths. Life is unfair, that way. You surmounted Everest, Death Valley, the Grand Canyon, only to arrive in a barren, muddy place, without the terrible desolate beauty they sometimes possess. You said I once calmed the storms in your soul. I've never forgotten that. It was always the wrong time, the stormy time, with you. Abandoning a ship you know will never truly make it to harbor, though it may bob and sink and drift for years before running aground, sails tattered, anchor lost.
If I did stop to speak to you, I don't know what I'd say. If it were a film I wouldn't need to say anything, I might run up and throw my arms around you before you could think, and kiss you, long and sweet. You would taste like smoke and coffee and rain. I would draw away, and say something about how I never go to kiss you goodbye. Which is true, I never really did. The last time I saw you, our hands didn't even touch. But this isn't a film. If I did stop, I wouldn't know what to say. You might not either. If I tried to kiss you, suddenly, I might scare you, set off the combat-tested reflex of self-defense, paranoia, panic. You would taste like coffee and tobacco, maybe ***. The pungent smell would be noticeable on your clothes as you pushed me away from you, cursing me, reminding me you told me never to speak to you again, unless it was to say I found some impossible way to return your dogged love. Your hands would be rough, dwarfing my small arms, your tall body dwarfing my small frame. I felt beautiful when I realized how small I was next to you. I still remember that night when you put me on your shoulders like a child, and carried me back to the car, as I bent down every so often to kiss you, wearing your hat. You'd cut your hand badly at work, but still insisted on holding mine.
I don't know what you'd do now. I don't know what I would do now. What should be done? I know I do not want to rekindle the drenched flame, but care is still lingering. I think of leaving a ten under your windshield wiper, hoping you'd buy yourself a meal. I consider writing the title of the song I wrote about you in the bill's margin. I wonder what you'd think now if you heard it. I can't remember if I ever sang for you. Probably not. We never got drunk together, and I've only ever sung in front of others slightly intoxicated.
But I'm drunk now. Drunk on rainy-day memory and what if's, and I realize I will never sing for you.

I am driving home under the melancholy grey sky that reminds you of the empty spaces in your chest. Sickly yellow street lamps are coming on, one by one, highlighting the potholes and cracks in the road. I can't help but picture what it might have looked like in the 60's. The still all American heartland town, when the rusted buildings were new and shining, when the once grand houses had fresh paint, well manicured yards, un-littered by fake deer and old tires. I remember old news papers from estate sale boxes, pictures of women in smart dresses with cinched waists, sitting prettily in the society section. They are probably dead now. Buried in the cemetery on a hill that overlooks the city, and down onto the tiny matchbox houses now boarded up or falling into disrepair. Still yet it seems maybe it was never new. There was always the dust, the smudge, the ghostly fog on old mirrors. I wonder how it will continue, or if it will at all, perpetually rise and fall, as all things do, or simply fall, the lifeblood of youth trickling out and down the freeway, or soaking into the already saturated ground.
     Hopeless seems so dark a word, but the truth was never pretty, was it? Perhaps, here, is the hardness of truth, in its grit, its blood. The pebbles that stick in your palms and skinned knees. They once said the depressed were the most realistic of us all, that it was the perpetual state of the human mind-- everyone else in optimistic denial. I was inclined to believe them. Our rose colored glasses taint the world cotton-candy pink while E-flat minor and discorded harmonies echo somewhere in the mountains, longing, hard, sad.
     What haunts you? I want to ask the old rail road tracks. Who died here? I say to the gaping cinder block house. Do you remember what laughter sounds like? I know you remember the bark of dogs, the screech of tires, gunshots or fireworks, who can tell. Dust the memories off the way we dusted sawdust and insulation from the boxes in the hoarder's attic-- find them suspended just the way you left them, open the room-- unchanged since the children left. The toys lie on the floor where they fell from small hands. The safest memories are the ones unremembered. The more they are recalled the more corrupted they become till we are painting our own picture all over again, and we are Van Gogh on a rainy night. Is that what happened? You remembered them all too often. You stared at the sun till you were blind and wondered why you could not see the stars. Yes, that must be it. You clutched those slips of laughter so greedily-- recalled them again and again until they faded, till now you hear nothing but the wind, and cough nothing but ashes.