"moroseness" poems
The workman told you to bury a curled dark lock
Of your dead baby’s hair in the earth,
A quiet offering to a quieter god
You spent several months weeping to the sky
Your small hands curled into your white frock
Work was left unattended in your colorful house
No food on the stove,
No boiling salt fish, or softened dumplings in murky white water
The pungent smell of cured fish filling the quieter home
The home, austere and shrinking into the long street
Your helper comes to do all this
Your children understand in their small ways
You covered the lock of dark hair with fresh dark soil
Palm fronds wave in the wind
Salty sea air kisses your wet skin
Tears make tracks on your cheeks like a map pointing to
Nothingness, like a page of a book with words of moroseness
Once you had my mother, birthed her into a world of noise
The sure and strong hands of the matriarchal mother,
Your mother, who’d delivered more babies than she’d had her numerous children
Then you cooked, you toiled, swept the veranda with your broom
Left the buried lock of hair in the locked cabinet of your mind
Now, when I make the saltfish, I do it with stilted preparation
My hands form lumpy misshapen cornmeal dumplings
I fry the little ***** of dough for too long, they come out dry
I pop one into my mouth and chew
There, the fragrant smell of your perfume,
Sweet lull of your voice, your birdlike hands.
Nov 10, 2023
Nov 10, 2023 at 8:27 PM UTC
there was never much left for me to say,
insofar as I didn't know how to articulate it or,
if I did, I no longer possessed the energy to do so.
Hope comes stranded, like a helium balloon
left to wander the skies once released
at a city parade.
A child not yet wise to the knowledge
that helium
is lighter
than air
imagines she can let go
to weave her little shoes
into secure knots with
both hands,
so by the time she looks up to find this renegade bulb,
it's nothing more than one of what could be
ninety-nine red balloons
floating in the summer sky.
In this sense,
it could be said hope comes
from all angles,
regardless of whether this
little drip of serendipity
is gifted by accident,
intention,
or
simple curiosity.
Existence always hurts.
But it's our challenge to choose
how it hurts:
will it be a chronic sickness unto death,
inspiring moroseness and jaded apathy?
Or will it feel like gym pain,
as if liquid gold has pooled
into every open crevice
of bone marrow
so the ache is nothing
but
a
friendly reminder
of our living vitality
through having
expended
the body,
mind
and soul
in satisfaction?
Mar 5, 2018
Mar 5, 2018 at 5:36 PM UTC
A night of disappointments.
Exasperations and constant
reminders of what could have been.
Why can't Happiness embrace me
for a single moment
without Regret
seeping in
from the sides?
His cold and spindly fingers
eventually seize me;
and I am unmoved
by the sweet sounds and encounters
of Joy;
He tries so hard to move me,
yet, to no avail.
The warm and comfort of
his presence goes unnoticed,
for Sadness enters
after I have been
raptured by Regret.
As I sit,
crying
Sadness softly sits
besides me;
he whispers,
"just let go; nothing will be resolved,
just let go."
I listen, his beckoning words,
the moroseness, in
his voice
is convincing and enticing.
Happiness, and Joy
are no match for his song.
This ballad of sorrowful peace;
stories with no
happiness
ever
after.
Dec 2, 2011
Dec 2, 2011 at 7:20 PM UTC
As children we seem to skim across surfaces
Of our days’ tranquil lakes
Like the basilisk running on hind legs
Out-pacing our (lesser than Jesus) predators
Impossibly drowning them in the wake
Of that chase, as we are learning to shield ourselves
By striking first, so as not to feel
that blow of life’s cruel anger and exhaust...
We know how to wade the weeping
Wreckages of our mistakes & missed opportunities;
Mistook with misunderstanding’s book:
"An Idiot’s Guide to the Malady of Mishaps / Moroseness."
As adults we grow the necessary gills
To breathe our own tears' folkloric oceans seeming
Vast as Mithra’s museums of mummified cries,
Drowned moments we silenced inner deep blues' / sky.
We are Merfolk,
Watching here our ebbing tides
How once we had legs like ballerinas, swift & light
Like our worries to aging blight
Stymied timely introduction to Triton nights….
Deftly anticipating the arrival of hindsight’s
Deepest fight to catch the rye and nimble child
Above us now, while we watch them -- Kites
Of memories as in our far away / freedoms
On the surface of our wars' tear filled lakes
Losing our inner / liquid flight…
From youthful wings to fins, and wordless sting
Learning to sink, swim, and breathe
Again-- Life :
our unheard Ariel under the sea…
We are Merfolk of dreams oceanic kisses
Voiceless we will lack magic to raise our wishes
We learn to sing in seaweed with
Music of happenstance and waves of need
We are similar to those lost depths
Inequalities and struggles all abyssal deep.
So together as Merfolk must quiet that loud sea
Loss & histories of mountains / memory
Nautiluses drowning in love’s diminishing poetry,
We are merfolk, submariners toward mystery...
Apr 26, 2016
Apr 26, 2016 at 12:39 PM UTC
You gaze down at your daughter, Camille, and lay your hand upon her body. She is asleep, resting after a long day, exhausted after the day with Boris at the Zoo, then the café in the park. You wish her father had been that affectionate, had taken the time to be with her, been interested enough to want to be with her and you, but he wasn’t, just other women, other things to occupy his life and mind. You stroke her rib cage; how thin she seems; not a bit like her father, not one ounce of him in her that seems apparent. You gaze at her hair, at the features that you can see, she takes after you, it’s in her face and eyes. Even her temperament is yours, you feel, and are glad, rather than her father’s moroseness, and cruelty. If you had taken you mother’s advice you would never have married Paterson, never have let his hands or lips near you, let alone marry the **** He’ll be no good, for you, Mavis, she had warned on your wedding eve. You never listened; never took note; you knew best you thought. Marry in haste, relent in leisure, you father had said, in that voice that made you want to hit him, but you never did, although he had hit you many a time as a child, even for the most trivial of things. Dead now, preaching to some other crowd now, wherever he is. You smile at Camille’s sleeping face. Picture of innocence. Like you as a child, you guess. But there had been no Boris in your mother’s life; just your father and his preaching and teaching and moaning and sitting at the table with his long hangdog features and the cane by his hand ready for punishments. You remember creeping into your parents one night as a child and hearing the most awful noises in the dark; like your mother were being strangled or beat up upon, you raced from the room, hid under your blankets in case you father should come and get you. Camille came into you room last month as you and Boris were making love, her voice knifed you, so that you and Boris fell apart like some circus act gone wrong. She had wanted a glass of water, her small voice echoing through the dark, Boris and you panting, going all frigid as if death had claimed. Boris lay smiling in the dark, as you went, took Camille by her hand, fetched her water, lay her back to bed and to sleep. Now she sleeps again. Picture of innocence. Angel of your life. Your precious. Your daughter.
May 22, 2015
May 22, 2015 at 3:11 AM UTC
off my shoulders
that has dragged
me down further
into the depths
of the waters
of inescapable depression
and undying insecurity
I just want
to surface from
this mundane moroseness
and float up
into the sky
into the warmth
on top of
the entire world
-AA
Mar 11, 2014
Mar 11, 2014 at 6:18 AM UTC
Yours
is a contented sleep
of hot ***
and deep love
wrapped in the arms
of dream's hold.
Ariadne
beside you
in the bed awake
and musing.
Your mother
is dead
her MS
having taken
its toll.
Your father alone
in his moroseness
and grief
and non belief.
Your younger sister
married in New York
writes occasionally
in her scribbled hand.
You turn in your sleep
the dream demanding
the images bright
and eye blinking.
12 years
in your lover's
care and love
and rows and ***
and down
the long avenues
of trust and jealousy
of have and hold
doing what you want
and not what
you are told.
You sleep on
leave the outer world
to the waking hours
of tick and time
and love and kiss
and tell.
Sleep on you
same ***
loving girl.
Jun 6, 2017
Jun 6, 2017 at 12:57 PM UTC
I always walk into social settings not knowing the right way to smile.
the last time I was out, it was a funeral
where uncles and fathers waited for the body quietly,
where mothers and aunts divided their time
sizing up every girl who walked in fresh,
evaluating the contents of moroseness on her face.
did her nail paint make her look well-maintained
and yet purposefully unaware of her manicure?
her clothes, were they the right balance of panache and mourning?
and what about her mannerisms? is she polite and demure,
is she the girl next door? is she an acquaintance? is she family?
well, if she is, why isn’t she in the right colours?
how bold of her to wear eyeliner!
her mother ought to have taught her these things.
cue scrutinizing the parent, the birth giver:
at least she’s wearing white clothes. her fingernails are light pink?
eyebrows rise up in the odd combination of judgement, approval , and the tiniest hint of contempt.
the grandmothers come out from the woodwork
because their experience and expertise in death is unparalleled by the young:
they seize responsibility of the rituals,
tutting at the slightest deviations of the routine they’re well-versed in.
what a business they make of death.
the loss isn’t theirs to feel, the life isn’t theirs to grieve.
‘the head faces the north, the toes to the south! don’t spill the grains unevenly! come, let me tilt open the mouth so you can quench the thirst of the dead with holy water.’
they know it all, those devious grown-up so-and-so’s. we’re still too alive for their acquiescence. they’re so assured in their rites, they’d take over from you at their own deathbed.
they’re watching you very closely, don’t you forget.
they’re not here for the deceased, they’re here to inspect.
I stay under the radar with my tight-lipped smile,
they may not live for too long, but I’ll be here for a while.
Apr 2, 2019
Apr 2, 2019 at 12:58 PM UTC