Mr. Toad's Wild Ride

I feel as if I am on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.

You know, the one at Disneyland.

The one that spins its way through

faces, 

strange and distorted.

No one’s sitting at the wheel,

yet it is being driven by a lunatic.

It is like that now.

Into darkened rooms I go.

Horrible men lunge at me,

trying to grab me and take what is mine,

all the while laughing,

always laughing.

I feel the wind on my face

as I am hurled about,

too scared to scream.

From every corner they come,

with their orange hair and glowing lifeless eyes.

Demented creatures,

who lack depth and intelligence,

and move as if they were on tracks.

Soulless creatures.

Everywhere there is DANGER,

DANGER, DANGER.

but no one does anything.

The judge points and laughs

incapable of restoring order,

in an order-less world,

where nothing makes sense,

but insanity and greed. 

All the while the barrels hang over my head,

and we keep spinning and twisting

further out of control,

waiting for them to fall.

Who are these men with their pointing fingers and

white teeth

deciding my fate?

It is all a jumble now,

a horrible jumble,
from which I can not escape.

I am dead

It’s never the same.

Day in day out.

The way light hits my eyes.

The way I see and don’t see.

How words hit my ears.

It’s as if it were all some surreal watercolor put before me,
one I can not understand. 

Now.

I am not the same.

I try.

Lord knows I try.

But I am not me.

Now.

After the marble.

I am one of the other ones.

The damaged.

The broken.

The infirmed.

Lost.

Trying to find my way out

of what is my brain.

Now.

Some days I want to just start screaming,

“Let me out.

Let me out.”

But no one comes.

Other days,

I limp along in my new reality

trying to forget

just who it is I am supposed to be.

Who I was.

I see but do not see.

I hear but do not hear.

I am dead.
But still I walk.

Holding on to Fofo

There isn’t much time now,

is there?

You and I sit together

on the edge.

Me on the chair,

and you on the bed.

I watch your face,

your eyes,

your lips,

to see

what you still know.

Your lips pooch forward,

strained,

as if trying to find somewhere to land,

an alien ship of sorts.

Hands limp as broken butterflies

by your side.

You tell me not to worry.

You tell me everything will be o.k.

You tell me you are fine.

But how can I believe you?

You do not know what day it is.

Or where you are.

Or who the president is.

Or how much I will miss you

when you are gone.

I hold your hand.

Stick my finger in yours

and hold on,

like I did

when I was a little girl.

Now, I do not know what I am holding on to.

You are already gone,

slipping away from me

faster

than I could have believed possible.

It is all happening too soon.

I am still standing on that fake white box

in my red Christmas dress,

holding your hand,

your face just out of the frame,

holding on and crying just like now,

trying to get something from you,

I could never have.

Holding on and crying –

Fofo.

About a Boy

When I call now,

I don’t think he knows who I am.

He pretends

to have a conversation with me,

but I can tell,

he is faking it.

 “What are you doing?” I ask.

“Answering the phone,” he says.

He always says answering the phone.

Then he carries the phone

with the long cord

over to my mother.

“Who is it?” she asks him.

“I don’t know.  A boy, maybe.” he says.

“A boy?”

When I hear him say this,

my heart sinks into my stomach

because I really thought he knew he was speaking to me.

He didn’t.

He was faking and I believed him. 

He’s good at faking.  

He’s been doing it all his life.

Always smiling and charming

while valium raged inside him.

Nobody knew.

Nobody knew the anxiety that pulsed beneath his veins

or the anger

that sent him storming down the hall.

Nobody knew

but me.

Now, he wakes up in the morning,

and sits on the edge of the bed

and wonders where his clothes are.

Sometimes,

he’ll put his pajamas back on

to go down for breakfast in the dining room.

“What difference does it make?” he’ll say.

“Pajama, shirt, it’s all the same.”

I try to explain to him there’s a difference.

But he tells me I’m “talking nonsense.”

I guess I am.

What difference does it make?

Now that words have lost their meaning

and faces are slowly becoming blank canvases to him.

Even mine.

What Lies Underneath

I think about the hatred that fills veins.

Snow white swirling

and churning,

covering everything it touches,

obliterating the differences among us.

No shade

of green or brown

or nakedness.

Nothing exposed.

Just the icy cold stares

of eyes frozen in place

too scared to see

what lies underneath.

I think about this hatred

pulsing,

day after day,

taking on a life of its own

passed down the way fine china is passed down

from one generation to another.

Eaten from the same silver spoon.

Licked clean,

then stuffed in drawers

until the next new set of hands comes to

pull it out,

polish it,

make it shine again.

A dying Balloon

What is this shit,

this filth,

this dark 

that resides in me?

That pushes me

deeper

down

into the ground,

that buries my soul,

my smile,

my velvet limbs

as if they were mere afterthoughts?

I am here,

alone 

in the dark,

alone with my blindness now

unable to see 

the street that stretches out before me,

the row of books,

the aisles of food. 

How can it be that who I was 

could be taken so easily,

with a snap,

a crack,

a second too long,

a wet mistake?

It is easy for you,

the others,

the untouched,

to sit and judge

to go back to your little lives,

your perfect little sighted lives,

while I stumble through mine now

like some freak. 

A trip to the library is too much.

A war zone of the worst kind,

shuffling through ‘p’s and ‘q's

too embarrassed to ask for help. 

It is all fun house mirrors now

playing games with my brain

while I try to hold on,

hoping to make sense of the un-senseable. 

A nonsense without laughter.

My head a warble on a stick,

bobbing along,

inconsolable.

like some dying balloon.

A New Normal

What doesn’t work is fear.

Crouched and ground into the corner

like so many boxes of broken trash

left for the taking.

The silent tears

running down dark checks.

The weighing of terror

in faces and unforgiving eyes.

What doesn’t work is passivity.

Allowing

the wrongs,

the war,

the stupidity

that permeates the thoughts and words of others

to become our new normal.

History repeating itself without awareness.

The breaking of bones

and spirits

and innocence.

The evil lurking on both sides of the street.

Ours and theirs.

Neighbor after neighbor,

turning against the other.

A new spy

born out of paranoia and blonde-eyed-media

sold to us as vigilance

and duty.

What doesn’t work is hopelessness.

Curling up in a ball and waiting to die

because the injuries have become just too severe to bear.

To no longer reach

for the sun,

the bird,

the flower,

the red balloon,

because hands can not open freely.

What doesn’t work

is to resolve to

live in the dark,

believing

it is this way,

and will always be so.