Escape From Lowry

She is convinced she is being poisoned.
“It is in the coffee and tea, “ she says.
“They give it to us to keep us sedated,” she says,
“but it won’t work on me, I’m getting out of here.”
I keep trying to convince her that she is not in jail.
She is in assisted living and she is free to come and go
as she pleases.
But she doesn’t believe me.
She is still planning her escape.
She has it all figured out.
She is going to sneak
out of her room,
walk down the hall,
take the elevator to the first floor,
walk past the front desk,
and
then go out on to the street,
where there are shops
and restaurants
and people
who can still
drive.

Green Hills

I did not go with him today,
to meet the weird man in the country.
The weird man didn’t want me to come.
Instead, I braved the Sunday crowds at Whole Foods
and flirted with the produce man
complaining to him there was nothing to eat,
which we both know,
there never is.
The strawberries looked lousy,
as did the kale and the apples,
and the organic oranges,
and why isn’t there ever anything in season in April?
It’s April!
Not January.
I walked up and down the aisles
annoyed by the throngs of other people
and their inability to navigate through the store.
Everyone either moved too slow,
or not at all,
or laughed too loud,
or had their snotty kids with them blocking the aisles
crying over cookies or pie,
dripping their viruses on everything they touched
with their mealy little hands.
I sampled some ridiculously overpriced,
melting gelato.
What I was supposed to get from it,
I don’t know.
But the sample sure as Hell didn’t make me want to buy any of it.
Neither did the woman’s sales pitch.
As I checked out,
I couldn’t believe I had driven all the way over to the Westside for this.
I could have gone to East Nashville
driven over the Jefferson Street Bridge,
and gone to our local health food store.
At least there I would have only been subjected to hipsters
and ineptness.
But, for some reason,
I thought it would be fun to go to Green Hills.
I was wrong.
I imagined myself sitting outside at one of those shiny silver tables,
reading my book and eating honeydew melon.
But the sky was grey and the clouds were already rolling in
and the wind was way too harsh to read a book in
without a struggle.
So I took my bag of organic beans and rice and salad,
and drove back to the ghetto,
and read my book in my 8x10 office
listening to the stackable dryer spin,
wishing I had never left home at all.

Just A Room

I never wanted children.
Just a room in a house,
quiet,
tucked away,
with a view of the ocean.
A room of my own
where I could let my words come and play with me
like lost puppies.
They would lick my face,
and nibble on my toes,
and remind me of the sweetness of my mind.
I would roll around on the floor with them for hours,
trying an adjective here,
a noun there,
watching stories shift from right to left
and back again.
Trees appearing.
Roads and fog
and the smells of lovers,
past and future.
The birds in chains.
The horizon bleeding in the distance.
Harlots and Jesus
and roosters crying all day.
And people wandering through their lives
with no plan at all,
forever young.

Cherry Coke Girl

Once upon a time
I was
beautiful,
white,
brown,
A fighter in a fight for something
bigger than taxes
and hatred.
A resistance girl
on a stool
smiling when I wanted to spit.
Drinking my Cherry Coke with a straw
and eating my grilled cheese
with one eye on the door.
I came to this world free,
and was enslaved by stupidity.
Me, the rare antique.
The bronze statue.
The paper fly
easily crushed by a glass bottle
or newspaper.
Where Do I Begin?
Can I slide down into my chair,
and drink in Summer
and green slushes?
Let my toes dangle in the water
and watch the dragonflies
in June?
Let my body float
face up
down the river
and
hope someone will throw me a line?
Give me a room?
Give me
a hiding place from evil?
A world of my own?
Last night I dreamed about you.
You and your money and your wife.
Your kitchen with its gleaming metal shelves
and designer colored walls.
Your little house
with the perfect mowed lawn
and the pink flamingos in the yard.
You,
and your perfect white world.

Slipping Away

What lies in the corners?
In the sleepy green memories of your mind?
The waking?
The moving?
The falling of earth and sky?
The endless sound of possibilities?
The coming and going of years,
like lonely children
no one wants to hold.
I know about solitude.
I walk alone,
down the path of nothingness.
Into the dark I call
home.
Did I make a mistake?
Did I turn left when I should have turned right?
Did I wander too far down my quest of loneliness
and prove myself right?
Where is my husband?
My child?
My somber morning?
Is it there in the rosebushes?
Beneath the elm?
Under the tomato plant I planted last Tuesday?
Is it around the corner?
Or just South of yesterday?
Time is ticking.
Time is ticking too fast.
No matter what I do.
I can’t get back.
I wonder if anyone can.
Tomorrow I will wake up one day older
and the feeling will be the same.
I am not in my life.
I am only passing through it.
I can not touch it.
Or change it.
Or move it
in the direction that I want.
It is all
slipping
away
without me.

Come Down

And what of tomorrow?
Should I let it slide
away into the grass
like the snake that it is?
Or should I reach down
into the folds of myself
and try to catch it?
I am thinking again.
A bad habit I picked up along the way
somewhere between walking and masturbation.
The rain is coming.
I can feel it in the wind.
All that dampness.
Waiting to explode.
Wanting to come
down
on me.

Melting The Years

It is better this way.
He,
on his side of the room.
Me,
tucked away in the back
away from the wasps,
away from the pollen
and the wind,
and the little children screaming on the playground
while their teachers bake in the sun.
We fall into holes too easily,
he and I.
Step in the trench and let one foot fall
and then before we know it,
we are dragging
mud and leaves
into our house.
The filth of the outside on our floors and in our beds.
The thoughts in our head
growing louder and louder,
keeping us down
until
they dictate our every move,
The lilies and the roses,
the buds of Spring,
wasted on us.
How easy it is to languish in our darkness.
Only to wake up older and dumber than before.
The hit in the head I took
has left me dazed.
Slow to react to the spider on the wall,
dying from insect spray.
We kiss
and when our lips touch there is nothing
to melt away the years.

Eggs On Toast

In the shadow of it all
sits me.
There,
curled up and wrapped
cupped beneath my building.
A broken order
coming in slow.
Eggs on toast.
The bottle guitar sliding down the road.
My belly aches and I am bent over in black
face.
The youngest of two
finding my way
across books and letters
a useless card on my desk
promising nothing now.
Outside, the voices cackle and fall
rough as wool,
drunk to all,
incapable of understanding
Spring
and its beauty.
The robin calls
a pink
scream
beneath a cherry moon.

Junkie

All that frosting sitting there in my eyes,
that sweet sticky stuff.
Cream cheese glaze with sweet potato.
The “healthy” choice.
I bought it.
Took it home in my little white paper bag
Like some kind of
junkie.
Bit into it,
face first.
Nose diving in to cream.
Inhaling the fumes.
Eyes rolling back in my head.
Sugar pulsing through my veins
leaving me
altered
and very stupid.
My vision blurred.
My head spinning.
A regular drug trip.
And they say this stuff is legal.
That’s a joke.
There’s no stronger drug out there than the white powder.
I know it
and so does every other five-year-old out there.
He sells them out of his house.
He and his six kids
and his wife.
He makes them in his living room.
Day after day.
Fourteen hundred an hour.
He is the Willy Wonka of death.
The master maker of diabetes.
The orchestrator of tight pants and bulging bellies.
And the people keep coming and coming.
Each one buying six at a time.
Carrying their little bags and their plastic trays.
The door swinging back and forth.
The addictions growing.
Lemonade.
Cookies and Cream.
Red Velvet.
Wedding Cake.
Chocolate.
Peanut Butter.
The poor helpless creatures can’t stop themselves.
And it is all legal,
this slow killing.
One hundred percent legal.
I vow I won’t be one of them.
I vow I’m not going back.
But I’ve made that vow that before.

The Strudel Makers

They are disappearing.
The old men who sit at counters and order nickel coffee
and tell their war stories of bravery against Nazis.
The women who drive Cadillacs and smell of perfume
and carry wooden canes.
The ones who ran hair salons out of their basements
and bought properties for just the taxes owed.
The ones who knew how to scrimp and save
and make the best peach cobbler ever created.
The ones who aren’t scared of these young thugs you see on the corners.
They’ll tell them to “straighten up and pull up their pants.”
Tell them they’re “acting the fool.”
I’ve heard them say so too.
I’ve heard them say things I would be scared to say,
these grandmothers will lavender hair
wearing the finest feather hats.
They sit in church and know what’s what.
They’ll grab a stick and whip you good.
They come from hearty stock.
Not like now.
Now, we are made of paper
and tin foil,
fast food,
disposable living,
blowing in the wind.
A watery stock susceptible to every disease,
virus,
and pill on the market.
They got by on liniments and creams,
Tonics passed down from mother to mother.
They never needed the assault of drugs we seem to need just to survive a day.
The strudel makers.
The ones with the touch.
The ones who could make chicken soup that was real
not out of a can.
The ones who learned from their mothers
and their mothers beforehand.
They are disappearing.
The original pasta makers,
and bread makers,
and pickle makers.
The ones who put quality ahead of price
and valued their name more than anything else.
Soon they will be gone.
And we will be left with a generation whose
only accomplishment is that they know how to “tweet.”

Back Again

I am back from SXSW.
Back from the throngs of party-goers
and hoards of headbangers and thirst quenchers.
Back from the never ending traffic and the ever elusive parking spaces.
I am back from the shabby hotel rooms and chipped desks
and bathrooms with exposed wiring.
I am back from sugar-laden breakfast and front desk clerks
who are either too tired or too indifferent to care.
I am back from plates of rice and beans and lard and chips.
I am back from noisy restaurants and rockers who all look like they went
to the same place for their haircuts and their clothes.
I am back from red lights
and girls too drunk to stand without the support
of their “boyfriends.”
I am back from vomiting in the streets and slutty looking women
slapping men who grab them.
I am back from sobbing and screaming and laughing.
And yes,
I am back from seeing and performing some great music.
But I can honestly say
I do not want to go
back
again.

The Parent Trap

At night
my mind spins out of control,
running the numbers
like a bookie.
If I had just bought a thousand shares
of Baidu
we’d have five hundred thousand dollars now.
If I bought five hundred shares we’d have two fifty.
And on and on.
Different combinations.
Different outcomes.
If ‘x’ then ‘y’.
If ‘p’ then ‘z’.
In all of the scenarios we are much wealthier than we are now.
I tell myself if I had done this,
everything would be fine now.
We’d have enough money
for them to stay in one of those
really nice assisted living places.
The kind with the fireplaces,
and real dining rooms,
and libraries full of hard cover books,
not cheap paperback romances
thumbed through a thousand times,
smelling of perfume and ham.
They’d be groomed and waited on like prized poodles,
by people who would really care about them,
or at least be really good at acting like they care.
Now, with the funds we have,
I feel like we are bargain bin shopping,
searching the aisles of Wal-Mart for price cuts
and rollbacks.
Hoping we can give them brie
on a Kraft-singles-budget.
It is all so awful.
I know I should be happy
that they can even afford to even go to one of these places,
but I’m not.
It doesn’t feel like it’s good enough.
I guess the bigger question is
why I have taken all of this on in the first place?
In the last few months, I have decided I must transform myself into Warren Buffett,
doubling and quadrupling what they have,
watching it grow on paper,
and then racing in at the last minute with cash in hand to save the day.
Why I think I must do all of this I don’t know.
I didn’t cause their problems and I can’t cure them,
but I still want to.
I want to
swoop in
and change the numbers.
Change the facts.
Change the last thirty years into something healthy and good.
Rewrite history and their choices with my pen.
Fix it all.
Her diabetes.
His Alzheimer’s.
Their lack of preparation for their “golden years.”
Make everything perfect.
I know I can do it.
Now, If I could just find my damn cape.

Naked As A Fish

I was an island.
A dumb howl
sinking in waves and shells.
A lapped-sore body
smelling of tongues and teeth
and tails.
A lonely
vomit of lava
slow to cool,
quick to anger.
Yes,
I could remember love
and the way the sun
would freckle my back
as I stood on the ferry.
The marks are still there.
Can you see them,
right below my bra straps?
The trips to Boliver,
in search of crabs
and wings.
The men and their eyes
glaring at me
on the roof deck.
It didn’t matter that August
was long and worried,
a dress bent brown,
like a rotten flag
hanging for all to see.
I was their lighthouse,
flickering for the hungry masses,
spreading myself open,
naked as a fish.

Lessons In Swimming And Taxes

On Thursday,
I am going to go meet with a professional
to get help with my taxes.
I’ve never gotten help from anyone before.
For the last fifteen years,
I’ve done my taxes myself.
I’ve done Schedule D,
and Schedule C,
and Long Term Loss Carryover.
Schedule A
and Schedule B
and the dreaded 1040.
I’ve accounted for every receipt and expenditure.
And after doing them for so long now,
I can honestly say
I feel pretty confident about my knowledge.
Still,
given that this year is slightly different from the others,
I think now might be a good time
for a professional check-up,
a fine tuning,
just to make sure
I’m as good as I think I am.
It wasn’t always like this.
I didn’t use to do my taxes.
My mother did them for my sister and me for years.
Then one day,
out of the blue,
she walked in with all the tax forms, threw them at me, and said,
“Here, you can do them now. I’ve had it.”
No explanation.
No sitting down with me and telling me that she thought it was important that I learn to do these things myself,
no guidance as to what to do or how to do it,
just an avalanche of forms coming at me.
Just like that,
she had thrown me into the deep and asked me to start paddling.
I did the same thing to my dog, Trouble, once – threw him into the deep.
A lake.
He’d never swam.
For some reason he thought he didn’t know how.
We were out on this paddleboat in Michigan and we decided it was time he learned
what he already knew.
We picked him up and tossed him in the lake.
The moment he hit water,
he started paddling in a panic.
He was terrified.
He wanted out.
He tried to get back up on the boat,
But couldn’t.
Paws flying.
Crazed look in his eye.
I jumped into the water next to him,
to calm him down,
and his long black nails ripped into my thigh.
“That’s just punishment,” I thought, as I felt my warm blood seep into the water.
When we finally got to shore,
he shook the water off his coat
and just looked at me
as if to say, “How could you have done that to me?”
I felt awful.
I knew immediately what I had done was wrong.
At the time, I didn’t know then where my cruelty had come from.
But I do now.
It was taught.

Still Home

Just when I thought it was getting quiet.
Just when I thought I might finally have peace
of mind,
it’s happening again.
A white paper arrives in my mail box
with the words “notice to vacate”
and once again,
I am back in January,
my mother running naked through the house,
my father at the Kroger.
Police
and sirens,
and doctors,
and needles,
and neighbors,
nosy neighbors,
and ‘For Sale’ signs,
and greedy funeral-home-made-up-looking-realtors,
and money moving,
and disappearing,
and bulldozers,
and dirt being raised,
and my childhood home falling,
and all the unrest,
coming and coming,
and no stillness,
no stillness
now for three years.
Trips to emergency rooms,
hospital stays,
screaming,
and pills,
so many pills.
Doctor visits,
and trips to the dentists,
and surgeries,
and rehab,
so much,
so much,
that I have almost given up
the thought
of ever having stillness again,
of ever feeling calm,
of ever finding
home.

Black Tea

Oh God!
I’m tired.
I’m so tired I just dribbled tea
on my pants.
Thank God, they’re black.
I’m so tired I could barely get through yoga.
Damn downward dog.
Last night I had a headache,
So I took an Excedrin.
And I said to myself, “if you take this now, this late in the day,
you know you won’t sleep.”
But I still took it, and sure enough,
five hours later I’m in bed tossing and turning and wishing I hadn’t done it.
My mind is going about a hundred miles an hour,
And my legs aren’t far behind.
I stare at the chandelier.
It’s so fucking still.
So silent.
I wish I were.
God, not sleeping sucks!
And there’s nothing I can do about it.
It’s like taking acid,
you just have to let it run its’ course.
But the thoughts keep going and going.
I turn on the light.
My feet are freezing.
I put on my wool socks.
Now, my feet are itching.
I scan the room.
My clothes are piled up in the corner.
The pilates machine is against the wall.
The humidifier is spitting out water.
Hiss, hiss, hiss.
The air purifier is doing whatever the Hell it does.
And I just lie there.
The lights flick on from the house across the street.
“What the Hell are they doing up?”, I wonder.
Can’t anybody sleep?
Yes, it’s 1:52 a.m.
And I have yoga in seven hours and eight minutes.
I tell myself I won’t go.
I tell myself I’ll sleep in late.
Damn downward dog.
But when morning comes,
I drag myself to class and tell myself it will help.
I grab a rice cake with almond butter,
throw on my coat and run out the door.
Now, I’m tied and sore.
I drink black tea.
I won’t sleep tonight.

Sweet Silence

They are dropping like flies.
One after the other.
Each one with an excuse:
A lack of time.
a commitment to a business,
a basketball game,
an inability to do the work.
I understand.
It’s scary.
To sit down and be with oneself,
to look inside and stay,
to write from the deep corners
where cobwebs and filth have remained
motionless for years.
Some just don’t want to go there.
That’s fine for them,
I suppose.
But I do.
I want
to purge,
to explore,
to exhume the dead
and see what they have to say.
I want
to wipe clean
my insides
till they are shiny and bright
as newly minted nickels.
I want to know what drives me,
the good and the bad.
I want to take it out and hold it in my hands
to the light of day,
and watch it bend and twist
and ooze.
Only then
will I be able to sit and watch the squirrels play
and not worry about what I should be doing instead.
Dip my hand in the lake and let the water drip
from my fingers,
and not wish for more.
Taste the honey on my tongue
as it falls from my spoon
and bask in its sweetness.

A Tireless Optimist

It is so hard to get them form point A to point B.
An appointment with Access Ride
can end up being a three hour excursion.
Getting them to move is hard enough already,
but when you get public transportation involved,
forget it.
It’s almost as if the universe wants them to slow down,
to slip into the cracks of their sofas
and chairs and just go to sleep,
never to be seen again.
“We don’t do that,” says the woman on the phone.
“Yes, I understand,” I say, but “could you make an exception?”
No.
There is no exception.
There is only an endless list of people who seem to want to make my life more difficult
And drive my parents to their graves sooner.
No followed by No followed by No.
I try to be he voice of sanity in all of this,
the one who says, “it can be done.”
Somehow.
But I keep getting kicked in the face,
told there is nothing,
no one,
only red tape and endless hoops for me to jump through.
No supervision for a man with Alzheimer’s
and a woman
with dementia.
They could be dropped off and left to wander,
or left sitting and waiting for a bus that never comes.
Still, I am on the sidelines cheering
with my pom poms,
refusing to walk away.
A tireless optimist
for everyone
but myself.

Watching

Tonight,
gazing at the stars,
the cold breeze in my face,
singing a hollow song
of fear,
I scream
for someone to hear
what I have always known –
Something is wrong.
It is there,
at the back door,
men with knives
and black masks,
coming in to cut your throats.
You tell me there is nothing there.
You tell me to eat my jelly sandwich
without the peanut butter
and be quiet.
You tell me to look away.
There are no men.
I am being silly.
I am causing trouble.
Why can’t I just sit and relax and watch t.v.
like the rest of you?
Yes.
That would be nice.
But
when the men come and slash your throats,
they will make me watch.
I will hear your cries.
And see your blood run
red.
And you will be gone.
But I will be left behind
to watch.
I am still watching.

N The Hood

I am in the ghetto now,
looking out the window at the Hackberry trees
instead of my dogwoods.
Here, the occasional cardinal or squirrel that drifts into our yard
is a blessing,
an abnormality,
an odd-man out in a concrete world.
But I am not complaining.
I am happy to be out of West Meade
and the cloying neighborhood children
with their overpriced scooters and water guns.
Men driving Porsches trying to hold on to their youth,
and women getting lifted in places their husbands rarely see.
This world feels real.
Alive.
Cats run free
in search of birds,
or mice,
or anything they can find.
Dogs bark,
left out in the cold
to fend for themselves,
and the bass of the Bloods
drives past my street
on Saturday night.
Yes,
some good writing will come
out of here.