Fast Motion

It is all happening too fast.
The pop icon
and the angel
gone.
My extension in ballet.
Christmases and Thanksgiving.
What I believe.
Walking on Broadway
with the heat on my back.
C.C.
My thirties.
The pull of the ocean.
Italy.
Smoke-filled clubs.
The farmer’s market in Madison.
The drive-in movie in Smyrna.
Tick bites
and Stinky.
Night after night of Seinfeld.
Popcorn and White Sox.
Car accidents and burials.
My father’s Alzheimer’s.
Jack’s class.
3 a.m. nights in the editing room.
Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches
without the crust.
Sitting on the kitchen counter in the Meyerland house,
eating white toast with butter on it,
while my grandmother cooks hot dogs and minute rice.
I see all of these images
as if I were walking with my head turned backwards,
a strange morphed creature
trying to understand where I’ve been
without looking at where I’m going,
all the while certain
I don’t like where I’ve arrived.

Female Symphony

Oh beauty,
you blow like a horn
in my face.
An apple of birth
for me to bite into.
I am the mother of sleepless
nights,
legs turning and dancing
without rhyme.
Once a girl,
now a woman
fighting off time
with both my fists.
A lonely salesman
writing about sadness
and cups.
I have tried the deep voice,
gotten lost in to be Read and Sung,
and questioned my own muses.
But where may I ask is my Florida?
The pink pillow fights?
The laughter of children and stockings?
Have I been so dead I have forgotten the sweetness of sugar?
Each day I wake up more tired than the last.
A burned mattress
devoid of humor.
It is time to stop the voices of dread.
Time to smell the daylilies outside my backyard.
They are there for me too.
I am so much more than one lifeless sound.
I am a symphony,
waiting to be played.
Hear me Roar.

A Mother's Love

She is evil,
this mother of mine.
One minute crying to me,
about my sister,
the next minute,
attacking me for not being my sister.
She has done this for years,
pit the two of us against each other.
Now my sister and I rarely speak.
We are all divided,
nursing our wounds
and wishing for a quick end
to this so called family.
The worst part is
that I seem to be incapable
of stepping out of the way of my mother’s attacks,
or even see them coming.
You would think after seven trillion times,
I would have learned something.
Instead,
I stand there,
open as a kitten,
waiting for her.
One time her stroke is soft,
the next time,
a needle to my eyes.
When she is through with me
I leave twisted and confused,
my head filled with her voices
and opinions,
my life a whirling jumble of darkness.
Perhaps I should brush my teeth with mud,
then I would finally remember what it tastes like
to swallow her shit.

Doctor Love

You would think after awhile
she might soften,
open her heart a bit,
lower her voice
and stop going at the world
with a club.
I have watched her hitting
and lashing,
her voice constantly on the brink of explosion,
the screaming teakettle.
I try to stay out of her way,
to dodge her bullets as if I were dodging War planes
in the fields of Vietnam.
I look back to see the bodies
strewn.
Men left in the dirt,
heads lopped off,
arms severed and bleeding.
Eyes vacant
and lost.
A terrible field of destruction.
And those are just the ones she’s dated.

Pregnant Pig

This is madness.
This reaching and falling back in to
the hole
over and over again.
The calling and hanging up.
The forgotten sun.
The endless discussion.
Repetition upon repetition.
South,
East,
North,
West.
This love of darkness.
I do not like to question my hunger,
or how far the wagon will roll.
But I have napped twenty-five years in a flutter.
A deep pregnant pig.
And what of it?
My doctor offers me nothing,
but the needle.
And that ain’t gonna happen.
X-rays and MRIs
and nurses gone haywire.
Paper bags full of drugs.
What good is any of it?
I am still the same.
No treatment can cure.
Monday,
the dead turn over.
Tuesday
the snow begins again.
Wednesday,
the nuns are in their habits.
So am I.
So am I.
Thursday
and God is a purple throat,
hoarse and ineffectual.
Friday,
yes, well,
friday is August
dressed like a fighter
with no place to go.
Again,
and again,
everything and nothing
has happened.
Saturday,
the moon.
Outside,
the ocean is still going strong
while I am sobs
and tears
and rainwater in a plastic bucket
till Sunday.

Lifeboat

I am old.
A forbidden child
climbing over the garden wall
in search of a view I never should have seen.
My body quivers,
and my legs falter.
I am alone,
a rare antique
in a world of then.
It does not seem possible that so much time
has passed.
Half asleep,
I am full of the echoes of Manhattan
and Los Angeles.
My dreams, that grew up in Texas under the summer sky,
the day of your face,
are borrowed.
And still,
I can not let go.
I see you everywhere,
wearing a red Burberry coat.
Your wife
beside you
refusing to speak to me,
or even acknowledge I exist.
I think of your children
and begin kissing your neck
over and over.
How many years
since the Hollywood Hills?
Since the night of the party?
You,
driving off,
a fish
in search of the sun.
Me,
sipping my broth,
lying about my life
and our future together,
floating about on the open sea
in a cement
lifeboat.

Eeyore's Daughter

When I was growing up the character I related to in A.A. Milne’s books was Eeyore.
He was the doubter.
The naysayer.
The one who bemoaned it all.
The sarcastic, melancholy little
donkey who was always losing his tail.
Eeyore thought that whatever could go wrong
would go wrong
and it did.
Pooh, on the other hand,
always expected things to work out
and somehow they did.
Pooh annoyed me.
Whenever I expected anything it never worked out.
When I expected a birthday party as a kid,
no one would come,
or my parents would fight,
and my dad would end up walking out
and my mother would go to bed crying and I’d be left
standing in the hall
with nothing.
Same for Christmas.
I learned real fast that I was going to be disappointed
by the people who supposedly loved me.
So I guess it’s only normal that I would relate the most to the character
who believed
the worst would happen.
We shared a common heartache,
Eeyore and me.
I sat alone in the corner of my room
looking out at the world through his eyes.
It was a bleak sight,
full of greys and murk.
Gone was the yellow sun
and the pink blossom of wildflowers.
Gone was the sweet smell of honeysuckle and roses.
In their place,
black and mud.
Fear and dread.
Now that I’m older,
I’m trying to change.
I’m trying to unlearn and be,
and hope.
In five days it will be my birthday.
The day I’ve dreaded most of my life.
But this time I’m determined not to succumb
to the past.
I will wake-up and greet the sun,
or the clouds,
or whatever comes that day,
even
if it’s a damn tornado,
and
I will eat cake and ice cream,
and I will tell myself I’m loved,
and I won’t spend the day
looking for my tail.

Ten Lines and Counting


Words and windows
year after year.
To understand doing
do.
I have turned cartwheels in the sand
only to find
feet.
The last time a cowboy
came to my door
I kept him six months.
So long
soldier of joy
and the solitary sun.
So long
short hand Mondays
and Southern Goddesses
squinting at the sun.
I have run satisfied
in my red dress
waiting for Jesus
and peaches to save me.
Outside in the rabbit hole,
Trouble sticks his head in my
Naked Christmas.
The pig and the blue.
Is this all there is?
Hold on to nothing
and hope for good?
Bird against bird.
It’s all a black
Testament
to the day.
A ten line poem
gone on too long.

Grasping At Clouds

I think about it all drifting away.
Being gone in an instant.
One minute here,
the next….
I think about those poor people
on Air France flight 447.
The plane shaking and coming apart
in the air.
Their last seconds.
Did they know they had reached the end
or were they told everything would be o.k.?
I think about screams,
and hands touching,
and eyes searching one another for answers.
I think about the last few seconds.
Bodies falling out of the sky,
crashing into the ocean.
I think about how fast it all goes:
My parents.
My childhood.
This life.
I start wondering if I am living it well enough.
I don’t think I am.
Too much energy focused on bills and cleaning
and tidying up corners.
Dental floss and lint traps.
Trips to Target and Costco.
Radishes and Kale.
Meanwhile, vast expanses of my life have gone unattended to.
I’ve spent too much time trying to please,
to be good,
to be responsible.
What has it gotten me,
besides a clean conscience?
Where are the memories
for my hope chest?
Where are the bridges I’ve jumped off of?
The African elephants I’ve seen on safari?
How many albums have I made?
Where is that documentary I was supposed to start?
Or that novel I’ve been threatening to write for twenty years?
How is it that life keeps getting in the way
of living?
I think about the people in that plane
grasping at clouds
as they fell from the sky
and I wonder about what I have been holding on to.

Oh Stomach

Oh stomach
sick and churning,
stomach of night,
stomach of morning,
stomach of round and flat
and curved,
stomach of warning,
stomach of nerves.
How long will you gurgle and keep me awake?
How long until you throw up your chips
and refuse what I bake?
You’ve digested it all.
radishes,
chocolate,
tofu
and pie.
You’ve served me well,
but it’s you I defy.
Stomach of youth
and middle age
when will I listen
to all that you say?
Stomach of Thanksgiving
and Easter’s gone by,
Christmas
and cranberry
and stuffing piled high.
For so many years,
I’ve kept it all coming.
You gave me fair warning
with belches and gas,
but I wouldn’t hear it,
I said it would pass.
And so I kept eating
and eating
my fill,
all the while knowing
you’d give up,
your will.
It’s Russian roulette,
minus the gun.
Sooner or later
something will come
that will finally end
all that you’ve done.
And I will have nothing
but plastic insides
and long for the day
when I could hear your faint cries.
But you will be gone,
stuck in a glass,
for students to study
in some medical class.
And I will have nothing
but my memory of food.
Oh stomach,
please tell me,
why didn’t I listen to you?

Quigley

He is tall.
A sophomore in school
wearing Chacos and Hawaiian shorts,
walking Allie in the sun.
I remember when he first moved
to this neighborhood,
a boy-child,
a thin wiry nothing,
blowing about on his bike
incapable of calm.
Now his palms are bigger than mine.
So are his feet.
He is six foot tall
and dreams of girls
late at night
in his parent’s basement.
He mows the lawn without a shirt,
and plays the bagpipes on the hill
for the entire neighborhood to hear.
He used to be the squirrely one,
the one who got away with everything,
the coveted boy in a family of three girls.
Now,
he is like a Rorschach blot,
spreading across the paper
in every direction,
taking up as much room as possible,
unsure how far he can reach
before he falls off the page.