Brown Stone

Last night I found a tick
in my pubic hair.
The dark brown stone
feeding
silently upon my flesh
had been there since Sunday
when I squatted and peed
in Kingston Springs.
At the time, I joked
that I would probably get a tick
on me
and I did.
Now it’s hard body
was pressed into my soft body.
It lived off my blood.
My every move
was shared by it.
It never let me know
it was there.
It is like that with leeches.
They drain the blood from you
until it is too late
for you to do anything about it.

The Taking

I can not keep him from running away.
Yes,
there are chains and cages
and locks and ropes.
But if the animal wants to go Daddy
he will.
It is like that.
Nothing can be contained
that doesn’t want to be.
The cherry taste of open roads,
my camera clicking
black and white.
The first step of the hunt.
Each morning I am one step closer
towards what is mine.
If only I would begin.

My Decorator

Last night
I came home
to find the den “redecorated”.
The plastic blind over the door had been yanked down
and half of it eaten.
Both the shades were hanging limply on the two other windows.
The rug was piled up into a ball in the corner of the room.
My papers and bills were strewn about the floor.
My favorite children’s book, “The Little Engine That Could”,
was ripped and the spine stripped.
Both cushions were off the chairs
and a pair of shoes and a rawhide bone were now resting in their place.
It was as if an insane person had come in,
ransacked the place,
and then left.
But this wasn’t the work of a person,
This was the work of a two-year-old lab/border collie I adopted.
He had been so submissive
and gentle for the last two weeks
that I didn’t see this coming.
I wanted to yell at him,
but I didn’t.
What good would it do?
He wouldn’t know what I was yelling about now
and it would probably just frighten him.
So I just stood there thinking “bad dog.”
I gave him a few dirty looks
and spent most of the night ignoring him.
But this morning when I woke up,
I thought
his work was rather ingenious,
almost Picasso like,
the way the shoes and bone were arranged
and the papers scattered.
It showed a great deal of attention to detail.
It got me wondering,
what could he do
with a set of finger paints?

Catching Crabs

Friday
and the maple tree
is in full bloom.
What once had died is back.
What once was brown is green.
The orange daylilies are open and singing
their song of summer.
Everything is still.
The dogs lie in the sun
quiet as statues.
Children sleep in white linen
and dream of snow cones and hot dogs
and hours of fun in lakes and pools.
Summer is here
and with it comes freedom.
The freedom to sit and dangle your toes off the edge of a dock
tickling the water below.
The freedom to catch crabs with rotten chicken necks.
The freedom to lie on your back
and smell the honeysuckle
waft through the air like a fine perfume.
It is a time to remember
what it feels like to be a kid,
when the biggest worry you had
was how many days were left
until school started again.

Diapers and Lighter Fluid

Who’s the drummer?
Everybody asks when they come into my house.
“I am”, I meekly answer.
But the truth is, I’m not.
I haven’t drummed in years.
Oh, I bang on them
every month or so.
But I haven’t been a drummer since I was sixteen.
“Who’s the musician”?
“I am.”
But I haven’t put out an album in two years
and when I do sit down to write songs
it is after I have finished doing all the other stuff
I have to do.
The truth is I don’t feel like a songwriter anymore.
I don’t feel like much of anything.
I am sitting in this house decaying
like the floor joists beneath me
getting moldy and creaking louder with each step.
I am tired of what my life is now.
The same phone calls.
The same fights.
The same mornings
that end with the same nights.
I am tired of pursuing a dream,
and wonder what I have been doing
all these years.
I thought I had gotten somewhere.
But now I feel like I’ve been in one of those lap pools
paddling and paddling
but really going no where.
I turn up the street to my house
like I have been doing for the past ten years
and wonder why I am still here.
It is dead here,
a suburbia of gossips
that aren’t interested in changing the world,
just diapers and lighter fluid.
Trouble is buried deep in the ground
and every reason I had for being here is gone.
I wish I had left when he did.

New Love

I guess I need him.
I thought I didn’t.
I thought there was only one for me.
The difficult one,
the one who barked and demanded
and ran my life.
The one who gave me headaches
every time he got in the car.
The one who humped his bed
after every meal.
The one who kept me as his own.
The one who raised me to take care of him.
The one who acted like it was his house
and I was lucky to get to live in it with him.
That is what I was used to,
the nervous one.
The one who woke me with a start
and kept me going all day.
The one who guilted me
into long walks and overindulgences.
The one who would never take nice
no matter how many times I asked.
I loved that one.
But now I am falling in love with
a different one.
One who is quiet and calm
and asks for so little
it makes me worry.
He is content to lie at my feet
and eat what is given.
He is soulful and at peace.
He is a teddy bear
I can’t stop holding.
Yes,
I am falling in love.

A Poet's Confession

I am starting to question
the questioning of my neurosis.
This attempt at trying to understand oneself
is like trying to pull apart a rose to see
what makes it beautiful.
Once you get to the center there is nothing there
and it doesn’t even look like a rose anymore.
It is this preoccupation with self,
this need to unravel,
this mining of oneself,
that is creating the neurosis
in the first place.
I have forgotten what it feels like
to just be.
To sit and laugh and feel the sun.
To step out into the world
and feel another as they brush past.
I have locked myself away
into a Hell of my own making,
banging against the prison of my mind
like a lunatic
when what I needed was to never to go in there
in the first place.

Southern Goodness

I am trying not to react
to the stupidity of others,
the kind that left my dog dead
and leaves me waiting
forty-five minutes for a ten o’clock appointment.
It is so hard to be kind,
to stop and remember
the goodness of people.
Here
in the South,
the slow speech labors
and hangs
like a black python
in the trees
waiting to fall.
It is either
the pronunciation
or the slowness
that leaves me wondering
if the brain is working
at all.
I have seen men treat their dogs
like punching bags.
Mothers treat their children
like rags.
“Christians”
who haven’t a clue as to what spirituality is,
shove Bible verses and righteousness
down the throats of others
in the name of God.
I have seen ignorance
about gays,
and blacks,
and Jews,
and thought
as thick as grits and gravy.
I have felt myself curl inward
and away
and questioned how so many lives
can be about nothing more
than Doritos and beer.

Left For A Spade

The ten of swords
came to sit
upon my wooden table.
With broken eyes
he swallowed up my stew.
I asked his name
but he refused.
He turned away and spoke
in rhyme.
He did not wonder who I was.
Or why I dined with him.
He only thought of the time
when tens once carried swords.
Now they carry nothing but shoestrings.
We dined that night on shrimps and quail
and raised our glasses to the sky.
We did not worry who would come
or if the crow would fly.
The ten of swords
believed in love
and all that it would bring.
He had a lady once, he said,
but she left him for a spade.

Greek Tragedy

Today the food at the Greek restaurant
was awful.
The pancakes were cold.
The grits were as thick as mashed potatoes.
The toast was hard and the coffee was bitter.
When the waitress asked how everything was
I quickly said, “good.”
It was probably the second biggest lie I’ve ever told.
She didn’t really care
and I didn’t want to tell her the truth for fear of having a replay
of the exact same scene we had there 6 months ago.
That complaint about cold eggs led to a forty-dollar gift card
that took us nearly four months to use up.
The food here used to be good.
But that was before the owner/chef and his owner/wife
had a messy divorce.
Now the wife has re-married to a cook that used to work here
and the owner/chef has taken off and opened up a new restaurant
with one of his cute ex-waitresses.
The result: everything has gone downhill.
The new chef’s not nearly as handsome as the old one
and he can’t cook as well either.
He’s about two feet shorter and fifty pounds heavier
and he always looks like he’s got a layer of grease
on his face.
Meanwhile, the wife still looks as angry and unhappy as she used to look
when she was married to her last husband.
It’s like a weird Greek tragedy
only no one is cutting their eyes out
or having sex with their mothers.

Waiting For The Rain

It is time for me
to move on,
to leave the battlefield
and put my eyes on new targets.
All this fighting has been too much
for me.
Now
the trees accepted the loss
and wait with open branches for the rain
and so it is with me.
I can not be the crazy woman
beating my brain
senseless
with thoughts of regret
while moment after sweet moment
escapes me.
I can not run and hide
and gnaw myself ragged
trying to keep up with the sharks.
Better to let them go by
while I wait
limp
like seaweed
swaying in the tide,
struggling against nothing.

Jupiter

He
is here,
this new black dog
I know nothing about.
I brought him into my house
and out of the cage he lived in for the last thirty days.
He was scheduled to die this week.
He is soft
and sweet
and wags his tail at every word I say to him.
I am trying to come up with a name for him.
So far he’s been called “Springsteen”,
“Lorcas”, for Federico Loracs,
“Oscar”, “Bebop” and “Jupiter”.
I think I’m going with “Jupiter”.
He is a mystery to me.
He doesn’t beg for food,
comes when called,
doesn’t know the word “walk”,
seems to have never played with a ball
in his life
and is confused on a leash.
At one moment he seems out of breath
and the next he is happy to run the sixty yard dash
across a field at warp speed.
Just when I am sure he was a farm dog,
he doesn’t want to stay outside and prefers the cool of the a/c
and watching t.v.
All of this has left me wondering about his past life
and past owners,
questions I’m sure I will never have answered.
But none of that really matters.
All I know is
I am happy I adopted him.
He needed a home
and I needed someone to help me forget how much pain I was in.
It could be the start of a beautiful friendship.

Animal Colony

Penny and Springsteen
are locked inside cages
waiting for someone to come.
They at least have faces
while so many others don’t.
Tens of thousands
waiting for the needle.
I want to help them all,
bring them all home and let them live
in my backyard.
Watch them run
from tree to tree
in one big animal colony,
my own personal zoo.
They are so helpless
and scared.
They have no one,
no voice.
And the thought of them
being put down one after the other
is too much to even think about.
It is so much easier to
pretend the horrors of the world
don’t exist.

The Last Time

Some days the loss
is worse than others.
Some days I can go about my day
and be concerned with faulty windshield wipers
and oil leaks.
Some days I can sit in the red chair
and roll around the room lost in the squeak
of my wheels.
But today wasn’t one of those days.
Sitting on the bench underneath the tree
surrounded by fourth graders
I wanted to sing blue.
I wanted to tell them how much I missed him
and how amazing he was.
My dog.
I wanted them to take my head in their laps
and put their arms around my shoulder
and be the friends I never had.
I wanted to play charades with them
and swing on the swings
and talk about which boys liked which girls.
I wanted to go out for an ice cream with them and lick all the white
down to nothing.
I wanted to go back in time
and remember how good it felt
to laugh out loud
and not worry
if it would be the last time.

Four-legged Human

They are so perfect,
these four-legged creatures
that never ask for more
than to be walked and fed
and played with and loved.
They never judge us
or tell us what we could have done,
or kick us when we are down.
They never say hurtful words
or hold grudges,
or tell us we’re not making enough money.
They are happiest
playing with a stick or a ball
or chasing a squirrel.
They are happiest
sticking their head out the window
of the car and feeling the breeze blow.
They do not worry about tomorrow,
or about having enough,
or about their destiny.
They do not have a novel to write
or ladder to climb.
They are content to lie on the blacktop
and feel the sun on their back.
They do not look in the mirror
and count the new lines around their eyes
and fret over grey hairs.
They do not compare themselves to others,
or wish they were from a better lineage.
They do not spend hours crying over their mistakes
or wondering “what if”.
They do not start wars that should never have been started
or pollute the air with their factories,
or pretend to be something other than what they are.
They are far more human
than we will ever be.

Vanishing Act

It is like someone came
and took you away.
Just picked you up in a car
and you were gone.
One minute
here
taking up space
breathing the air.
The next,
nothing.
No mark of you
but the flowerbeds
you had dug
slowing filling and changing with the rain.

Little Shop of Horrors

When I think about them
I think about the insanity
that they are.
Both on that couch
like two ships
wrecked
on shore.
Both incapable of moving out of the way of the wave.
Day in
day out
the same day.
It is like a Sartre play
with no exit.
The Pinter pause
taken to the extreme
lasting hours, weeks, even months.
The same fight.
The same food.
The same endless drama.
No wonder I wanted to be an actress.
I was raised on a stage.