Pink Colored Halls

It’s been three weeks since I’ve gotten to write.
Three weeks since I got on a plane
and went home to Houston
to find my mother half-naked in the den
flashing me her bottom.
We dragged her into the car
and drove her to the hospital
where my sister sat on her
so they could take her blood sugar levels
and give her an I.V.
One psyche unit,
two doctors,
and an MRI later,
we still don’t know what’s wrong with her.
At the psyche ward,
she ate tough looking Salisbury steak
and macaroni and cheese on a Styrofoam plate
and seemed almost normal,
compared to the other patients
who walked up and down the pink colored halls
talking to themselves
and cursing their imaginary strangers.
I thought to myself
this is what crazy is.
Not what I have.
What I have is just neurosis.
A mind game
I play with myself.
This here,
this is crazy.
A shade of pink
I never want to see
again.

Purple Tongue

There is so much
I don’t need to tell you.
Like how nervous I am
about your mother coming
to visit us.
Or how worried I am
that we will never be able
to "do this right".
Or how scared I am
that having a baby would keep me
from ever fulfilling my dreams.
I wonder at night
if I am as crazy as my mother.
And in the morning
I think about telling you.
But it would do no good.
You are not a therapist
and you can’t fix it.
And even if you could,
it would be nothing more than
an empty swallow of grape juice.
Good going down,
but once gone
I would be just as thirsty,
and all I would have
to show for it
is a purple tongue.

The Good Daughter

I’m spinning.
Rag doll.
Where I am
I can’t get back.
I want to tell them
to leave me alone.
But he is almost 80,
and she,
as she likes to remind me,
is in her seventy-seconth year.
So I hold on and answer the phone when they call,
and take their abuse,
and wait for them to die,
hoping they don’t kill me
first.