Still Seven

I am out of paper.
Out of journals.
Out of pages to put down thoughts.
I have scribbled my last scribe.
Dribbled out the last adjective.
The last verb.
What does it matter?
All these thoughts and feelings
swirling around my head
like merry-go-rounds
gone wild.
I am still here.
Still extolling the same virtues
I did in 2001.
I am still here,
sitting in my room
with my back to the door,
looking out the window
at the squirrel and the bird.
I haven’t changed.
I am still seven,
twelve,
eighteen,
walking to school
dreaming of movies
and Academy Award speeches.
But everything else,
my parents,
my dog,
my sense of purpose,
has morphed into something else.
This morning,
the air is cold,
the wind ushers in fall,
and the leaves seem to laugh
with delight.
At last! At last!
Soon they will be bare
and it will begin again.
It is the unstripping
that brings me back.
The undoing of things,
of worries and fears
that keeps one young.
All is changing.
Even me.
I just can’t see myself.

Cycle of Crumbs

When I was there,
she yelled at me,
drug me down by my hair,
glared at me with malice.
When I was there,
I was her enemy,
her seed
of destruction.
The dark-haired demon
she could never nurse.
For years,
I wandered,
always wanting.
Now I know why.
She never loved me.
Now that I am of age,
my only revenge is to bear her nothing.
To end the cycle of crumbs
that brought me here.
I do not want to know the damage
I could bring to another.
I do not want her to live on.

Sisterly Love

Winter comes on
like an angry mistress
spewing her distaste
over being scorned.
Again and again
she bangs her head against the wall,
against the door,
against the unyielding foolishness
of sisterly love.
One minute wanting to include,
the next,
torn away at the seams by the dagger of
betrayal.
What to do?
What to do?
What to do?
No wedding day
with family.
No bedside grief of mourning.
No dreams of children to hold,
not with the fear of repeating the past
looming so large in her head.
Here in the garden
a bird flies into her hand,
the calming flutter of preciousness,
so young
and dear.
A winged angel,
bringing messages of comfort and joy
to soothe her thoughts and spirit.
She watches the grass grow
and wonders how it got so tall
without the rain.

Scum Sucking Yard Guy

What a little scum.
What a little creep.
Doesn’t call.
Doesn’t come.
Then when I do reach him
he tells me he wants thirty dollars more
to come cut the grass.
Thirty dollars more!
I always knew he was a jerk.
He always did a shitty job.
Barely picked up a stick.
Wouldn’t pull out a weed
unless I asked him to.
Throwing limbs in the neighbor’s yard.
Blowing clippings into my flower beds
when I wasn’t looking.
I never liked him
from the second I met him.
I just didn’t have anyone else.
But now that he’s gone,
I’m glad.
Really glad.
Things are looking up.
I hope he gets poison ivy.

Bearable

On Monday,
when the rain drums down,
I want a drink.
A bit of gold at my table.
Flowers in a vase.
Lace and white
as good as salt.
The sweet smell of cider
sweating in the sun.
Laughter everywhere.
The sight of a new lover
at my door
and stars,
oh so many stars.
I do not want these things
as a bird would want a worm,
or as a dog desires a bone,
but rather as a tree reaches for light.
These are not luxuries,
I tell you,
but necessities,
in this
black
cold
world
to make the unbearable,
bearable.

The Sun Is Poison

I am lonely
on the brown futon
with nothing but the wind beside me.
Selling sex in short dresses in heels.
What kind of life is that?
Here in my office,
the cardinal cries
and I listen
with eyes turned inward.
What do I see?
A girl,
lost
in the darkness of men,
unsure of her worth,
desperate to know love
like a sea clam closing
before she can climb inside.
Oh child,
with the painted eyes,
you are not so grown up,
as you think.
Let down your hair and walk
in the garden
with the rain.
The sun is poison.

Number 9

He was my hero too,
though I never knew him.
There was something about him,
his soft smile,
his quiet voice.
The way he led by example.
The way he gave to so many in need.
Standing on the sidelines
with his helmet in his hands,
he looked like a modern day warrior,
off to battle,
dodging players like they were bullets,
refusing to be taken down,
always fighting till the end,
wounded or not.
I cheered him on from my bed on Sundays,
screaming at the t.v.
And somehow, when he had the ball,
I felt like anything was possible.
Now, that hope is gone,
buried six feet under
for me and for everyone he ever touched.
No more Boys and Girls Club,
or backyard bar-b-que’s in Mississippi
for the neighborhood kids.
No more last-minute Santa wishes fulfilled.
Or help for Katrina victims,
or football camps for children.
No more words of wisdom for Vince.
All gone in an instant.
For days I have cried,
just like I did when Ted Hawkins,
another man I never met,
died.
I’ve tried to understand why I’m so sad.
And all I’ve come up with is -
he was my hero.
And heroes aren’t supposed to die
after being shot in the head by twenty-year-old girls
they’re having an affair with,
while they’re asleep on a sofa.
They’re supposed to die in tragic car accidents,
or in plane accidents making rescue flights to Bolivia for the impoverished.
And they're supposed to stay
on the pedestal we have built for them
until they die.

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.

Still Stuck

I am in my office
watching a spider crawl
across the floor.
It is a nasty looking thing
with fast moving legs,
scurrying about in every direction
as if it were being blown about by the ceiling fan.
I want to step on him
and end his life,
before he bites me
or gets lost in my guitar strap,
but I can’t do it.
For days I have watched a roach crawl in the kitchen window,
stuck between the screen and the glass,
unable to get in or out.
At night when I would come in to the kitchen for a glass of water,
he would be in the middle of the window,
like a Peeping Tom
and by morning,
he would be pressed in to the wood frame,
flat,
as if in hiding for the day.
Each day I looked for him,
confident that he would be gone,
somehow slipped through the cracks,
and on his way,
but each morning
he was always there.
Still stuck.
After about four days,
I started to wonder
how he survived in there,
day after day
with no food or water
and yet
still remained
so full of life.
He was a marvel,
of sorts.
A weird kind of Lance Armstrong.
I wanted to free him.
To reward him for his endurance,
but I couldn’t get the outside screen open
and I wasn’t about to open the inside window
and risk him getting loose in the house.
So I just left him there
hoping he would find his way to the outside.
It went on like this
day after day,
until
Sunday morning
when the Open House arrived.
I knew I couldn’t leave him there any longer
because most people wouldn’t view him as a selling point,
like hardwood floors or French doors,
so I did the only thing I could do,
I got out the insect spray,
opened the window for a second,
and sprayed the wood frame.
A few moments later
I watched him run across the wet wood,
fall on to his back,
writhe around uncontrollably,
and die.
That night,
as I sat in the kitchen booth eating my soup,
I looked at the empty window screen
and I felt almost
lonely
without him there.
Strange,
the things we become used to.

Pain or No Pain

My stomach has hurt all day today.
I woke up with it hurting at 7 a.m.
It’s 4:30 now and it’s still hurting.
I’ve tried fennel,
crackers,
kefir,
sourdough bread,
baking soda,
and Pepto-Bismol.
I’ve tried lying down,
sitting up,
taking a hot bath and letting the warm water hit my stomach,
and walking on the treadmill.
I’ve tried pretzels,
apple sauce,
bubble water,
tonic water,
a small sip of coffee to get things moving,
and meditation.
I’ve watched two episodes of House,
one episode of Friends,
and read a chapter of Saul Bellow’s Herzog.
But nothing has made it stop hurting.
So I’m going to get up and start writing anyway.
For too long now I have waited for my pain to stop
and conditions to be just right,
before I began writing.
The trouble with that plan is that there is always something
getting in the way.
And now, I’ve waited so long
I can’t keep waiting any longer.
All I have is now,
pain or no pain.
The weird part is,
the more I write,
the less my stomach aches.