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.

The Purpose of Thorns

The restless weed

there in the grass

begs for me to pluck it.

It eggs me on

as if to say,

“I dare you.”

I am not so easily led

to violence

without thought.

If I were to look closer,

I might see

the stillness,

the shyness,

the purpose,
of so many thorns.

Amnesia

It’s as if I can’t remember,

can’t keep it in my head

how horrible they were (are)

to me.

Some weird sort of amnesia

in my brain prevails,

driving me back

over and over again,

as if somehow by going back
some part of me thinks
I can

change it,

transform it into what I want it to be,

what it never was.

It’s insanity.

Nothing but insanity.

They are content to sit

and watch

T.V.

to waste their minutes

in front of the T.V. fighting

over the nut container,

and who screwed it on wrong,

and what’s in the box,

and why neither of them knows how to shut the window

or turn on the microwave.

They,

the ones who were supposed to protect me,

were too busy arguing to notice

I was floating face down in the swimming pool.

And when they finally did notice,

they didn’t jump in,

they just yanked me up by my hair.

They,

the ones who were supposed to love me

wrecked birthday parties and Christmases

with complete abandon

year after year.

Nothing mattered but them.

Nothing ever did.

I was there to wait on her

and placate him.

There was never a me.

There wasn’t room.

I just wish I could remember that

the next time I even think about hopping on a plane and coming out for Thanksgiving.

My Mother's Womb

The dark hole

I crept from

breath by breath.

Out into the sun,
out into the light.

The doctor’s hand

upon my throat.

The smell of nitrous

and alcohol.

The long tunnel.

The black.

The endless black.

One cord
cut,

but never severed,

pumping

me full

of blood

and fear.

Your breathing.

deep inside mine.

One,

but not one.

Always out of sync.

A dysfunctional rhythm
I could never right.

Dark Blood

Let me taste your blood,

Dark blood.

Let me hold the sweet salty

Liquid

In my hands.

We have walked

Side by side

For too long now.

You breathing out

Me breathing in

A black motorcade with no end,

Let me taste your blood,

Dark blood.

The kind that waits 

Ready to fall

Drop by perfect drop

On to white sheets

Into my mouth

On to my tongue

Better than wine

And stockings.

Let me taste your blood

Dark blood.

Not the kind wasted on menses

And paper cuts,

Or scraped knees

Found at the park.

No, I want the good stuff,

the deep stuff,

the stuff that lives inside,

the stuff that can’t be seen

without a little

effort.

Let me taste your blood,

Dark blood.
That’s what I want.

That’s what everybody wants.

The Cat 'Neath The Shack

The cat

who lives underneath the shack,

creeps out.

Gingerly.

Looking for birds

and mice

and anything he can eat.

At first,

it isn’t clear

what he will find

as he slips through the tall grass.

The birds

see him first

and immediately begin squawking

at his approach.

They alert one another

and swoop down at him,

giving him fair warning.

The cat doesn’t seem to care.

He continues creeping.

He has his eyes on something else.

A little grey mouse.

A small,

shaky creature,

trapped by a blue flower pot.

The cat moves in.

The mouse freezes,

hoping against hope.

A scream.

Then,

silence.

The cat goes back to she shack.

Content.
For now.

Pat

Today was her last day.

Pat.

I couldn’t believe it.

I came in ready to be stuck.

Ready for it all to be painless

as usual,

but it wasn’t.

It hurt this time.

She told me she was leaving.

Moving to Florida.

West Palm Beach,

to be with her husband

who had been offered a great job.

They were going to live in a camper

and pay off their debt.

Save up

and buy a house.

And she was going to go back to doing administrative work,

wasn’t even going to tell anyone she could take blood.

I had been coming to her for over three years.

She’d gotten me through the quarterly

blood tests.

She was the first one who had success,

when four others had tried and failed.

I’ll never forget the first time they put me in her chair,

trembling and crying,

and scared.

So scared.

But she wasn’t scared.

I heard her say, “I got it.  I got it.”

And the blood came.

After a few months,
I went from shaking every time I saw her,

to laughing.

We’d talk about Christmas,

and Summer,

and how hot it was,

and everything but the needle in my arm.

She was my “go to girl”.

Her gray speckled hair.

So no nonsense.

She’d always count “one, two, three.”

Usually, I barely felt it

and every time when it was over with

I would say to her,
“Pat, you’re the best.”

And I would mean it.

Why couldn’t anyone else

take my blood

the way she could?

Why couldn’t anyone else understand

my veins,

my small veins?

The others were so ham-fisted,

determined to dig into me

with forks

making me more frightened.

Now she is leaving,

and I am starting over again,

trying to find another Pat.

Maybe it is just one more sign

that it’s time for me to leave Nashville too.

Nothing stays the same.

Not even Pat’s blood test.

This afternoon, I pulled off the pink arm band where she stuck the cotton.

And for the first time ever,

there was a faint purplish bruise 

beneath the insanely small red

pin prick.

She left me
something to remember her by.

Paper Moon

There is a paper moon shining on me.

White and small

and glossy.

The kind that smiles when it would rather

cry.

The kind that bends down low in the summer

and lets its bottom hang

out

on to the fields,

and streams

and squirrels

and bees.

The kind that sizzles in the water,

but never makes a sound.

A brave moon.

A warrior of sorts,

casting light

where there never was light before.

A moon that says, “fear not”

for there is always hope,

even if it is as thin as paper

and could blow away
in an instant.

Miss Clarke

I am a hurdler,

jumping

over the mundane.

The infractions of the mindless.

The gesture of the hostile.

The unkind word.

The unmapped plan.

All threaten to leave me spinning

in a circle,

endlessly. 

Have I spent time,

where I shouldn’t?

In front of the t.v.

and the computer,

“googling” my life away about trifles?

How many times have I checked the weather

in places where I am not,

nor am I going to be

any time in the near future?

My virtual reality.

Why am I pursuing that which I do not want?

Information about people I do not care about,

nor will I ever know.

It is as if I have turned myself into a large trash dumpster

tossing meaningless data into my brain

over and over,

forcing it to work,

forcing it to sort,

forcing it to recycle,

and spew,

and make sense of,

when it is overworked already.

Any thought that comes in,
I indulge.

Any question,

I explore.

If I took in food,

like I take in information,

I would surely weigh five hundred pounds

by now.

And yet, I do not bother censoring what I put in to my brain.

Why?

Perhaps,

if I keep myself busy enough,

distracted enough,

exhausted enough,

I won’t have to face

Myself.

My art.

My life.