“Put it out there.” she said,
that first therapist, the one who saw you
at your blackest, every sin and flaw
laid out to this perfect stranger in some blind faith,
or more truthfully,
in your desperate need for confession.

You learned the hard way the corrosion
of pretending perfection. It’s corrosion
on you and all you touched. But the whole idea
of peeling the layers off, one by one, in public,
when you could barely admit your boils and brokenness yourself
seemed a whole new kind of madness
before you had cured the first kind.

“Put it out there.” she said.
“You are a creature of discipline,
and you feel a responsibility, even if only one or two reads
to continue writing.
The bloodletting will be your cure
and to do it in the market square
will help your healing. Trust me.”

I didn’t of course. Trust that is.
I was far from a place where I could trust anyone,
but too, I was desperate,
and so I began that slow strip tease
I continue today,

unwrapping layer after layer where anyone can watch,
never knowing where to stop exactly,
when enough is enough and when perhaps
I have moved to something too close to the flesh
where I will burn for my perfidy of truth telling
and when I do not strip enough away that no one cares.
It’s a strange game, poetry as therapy,
poetry as strip teases, but who knew,
fifteen years later,
that there were still layers left

You sit down with your coffee.
The short order cook is busy at the grill.
Things you cannot see sizzle.

There is music here. There is always musc here.
Eclectic and sometimes strange, rarely
what you would think of as morning music,
quirky and boppy with a bass beat you feel,
one of the benefits of a place run by musicians
instead of accountants.

The coffee is good. Rich. Almost, but not quite harsh.
Alive. A tonic for the past night’s dreams.
They were joyous things, your dreams,
full of blue skies and Abba,
interiours out of Architectural Digest,
beautiful and simple and white.
But always interrupted by betrayal.
You would wake, and insist on sleeping again,
hoping for a different ending that never bore fruit.

Better to wake. Better to shake off the lies of the night,
a power that rises only when you wake,
and like a soldier before battle, prepare yourself
for what is real.

Build me a house with many windows.
A house with many doors
to let the air waft through on an autumn morning,
to let the light in, to let me see the world outside.

Do not hang any curtains.
Set the furniture looking out.
and if strangers look in, fine.
They will see what they will see,
what is there, not all of it Better Homes and Gardens.

I am done hiding in the dark. It does not suit me.
I am too old for such foolishness.
Too old for hide and seek.
So build me a house. A new house.
A place bright and open.
Let the dusty corners show.
Let the leftover coffee linger on the kitchen table.
Breathe in the air like a monk
learning to dance.

A single door in the brick building.
A host of windows to let in light.
A place to live and worship and work,
all three, your soul built in red clay, wood and glass.

A place to look out. To see the light,
the green of gardens, the crowds at a distance.
birds, at least until winter,
to revel in the sun, the heat of it

without going out.

A place for others to peer in,
curious wanderers, strangers,
the invited and uninvited,
It is the price and privilege of so much glass

that they can see you in sacred times
and the profane, that layer by layer
your secrets are revealed,
your scars and sins as bright as the curtains that waft in the wind.

A place to prepare. To see what is out there,
The ugly and the beautiful, A place to pretend
you can choose which to live among.
You cannot.

It is all real, and with you or without you,
the things beyond your doors will go one.
You can stay, here behind you thick walls,
or go out and plant, choose what you will get to eat

at the end of the season.

Someone lived here once.
Families were raised.
Gardens were grown.
Animals, pets and livestock, wandered about.
Clothes hung on the line.
There were children and lovers and hopes,
bright as sunflowers.

Once. Not now.

Now, the neglect has driven them all away.
What was it? Poverty?
What was it? Broken hearts and trauma?
Too much to survive?
Greener grass waved in front of them,
a temptress,
and no one left to fill the walls anew.
Eventually, always, an abandonment.

It’s a cute little house, well situated
in a post card colored field.
Still savable, but you have lived here long enough
to know how this story goes.

You have restored a few homes in your day,
brought then back from the brink,
none of them a perfect restoration. Few are.
But enough that there was life in them again.
Gardens and hopes bloomed anew
and the paint shown bright. The rot removed.
They became homes again,
not merely houses, waiting to fall.

But you cannot save them all.

It is the lesson you learned in your own restoration.
There is only so much of you
and you will use it as well as you are able.
restoring those closest to you
as you work on yourself.
It should be enough,

but still, you mourn.

Sand. Seagrass. Wind.
You are fed.
Solitude for breakfast.

The scaffolding stands next to the stucco wall.
A maze of pipe and connectors, splattered
with a barrage of old paint.
Thick boards span the space from brace to brace,
strong enough to hold you
as you do the work.

There is nothing glamorous in it,
the scraping of old paint,
the replacement of rot,
it is hard, sweaty work.
Slow. It is slow.
It takes a long time
before you can celebrate the results.

It gets worse before it gets better.
That is part of it.
Each step, particularly at the beginning,
is an act of faith.

There will be surprises.
Any place with history will have them,
buried under the paint and plaster.
And each surprise will take more work,
detours. No need to plan or schedule.
You just do the work.
Day by day,
until it is done.

The faithful are always rewarded.
The old can, indeed, become new.
To an outsider, it seems like magic,
but you know the truth:
it is work.