Life's beautiful compromise is knowing I'd do it all over again to be here with you.
February 19, 2022
Tag: poetry
Green growing-things stand fast asleep beneath the churning sky. A breath of storm arrived that morn', a gusty, cloudy sigh. Fitfully, uncertainly, the snow begins to fall, its crystal down a formal gown on sapling straight and tall. Raw the norther's voice becomes in squalls and bitter frost. Above the gale of icy hail the sky itself is lost. Long into the black of night the blizzard's will is bent, 'tween limbs and leaves the wroth wind weaves a tale of harsh torment. Sharp upon the distant hill arrives the edge of dawn. Storm's icy reign begins to wane as snowdrifts gape and yawn. Silent flee the ragged clouds and so begins the day so short and cold it soon grows old and fades to solemn gray. Beneath the sky the growing-things now sleep in blankets white. Their tranquil dreams still filled with beams of springtime's wholesome light.
December 30, 1999
when i count my blessings i count your friendship foremost among them.
February 12, 2022
There's more love in the artless sincerity of a grilled cheese than in all the world's fully loaded words of earnest sentiment.
December 14, 2021
It's November first.
Leaves blow around on the trees,
still green, cut up among gray
and white clouds and
patches of blue
sky.
I have
no topic
with which
to begin save
my fixation on
future pain,
potential
loss.
Abandonment,
failure.
It's difficult to stay
in the moment.
I still recognize joy.
It
envelops
me
in much
the same way
grief pours out of me,
all overwhelming.
But I vacillate between the
saturated emotions of
love and the rictus
of anxiety that
lives in my
muscles,
fueled
by
obsessive, intrusive
thoughts.
Is everyone like this?
I can't let go.
Is it my age?
My sex?
My long history of broken
connections?
I'm building a home,
a household,
a family.
Is that healthy?
Or is the question moot?
I belong nowhere else.
I have no other refuge.
I'm building a refuge.
For him, for me.
With no
experience,
no models. I pull
endless ends together,
never knowing where the
middle is, knowing only that
I want to overcome all
obstacles, master all
daunting tasks.
For him, for me.
I still look down Washington
Avenue on my way home
from work, at the side-
walk in front of the
university, where
he said
yes.
The
happiest
moment of
my life, when the
whole world opened up.
Bloomed.
And we did it. Together.
We made a household.
Together.
We negotiated a respectful
roommate relationship.
Only gradually did
it become a
tenderer
thing.
My love for him is boundless.
It encompasses worlds.
Every moment of pain
and grief and fear,
every step inside
the vast terrain
of emptiness
that has
defined
my life
for
forty-
seven
long years,
was worth it,
to be here, with
him. Even if I fail.
Even if I'm abandoned.
Because I'm blessed with
his trust, his faith. How can
I do less than my best, to shelter,
to provide. Let at least that much
go to him, to that beautiful man,
that beautiful child. How could
I have known the day I met
him how he would migrate
through my soul to take
up residence in my
old, ugly, burnt
up heart? To
dissolve
so
much
of what
I thought
I knew and leave
resilience in its wake?
To become home.
Kin.
Family.
I want him in my life more than
I've ever wanted anything
in that life.
It's
November first.
It's
a new
lease. It's
a second year in
our home. It's a third
year of loving Eli.
December 13, 2021
when you say a woman is a goddess, remember that Eris was a goddess too. it's Thanksgiving and I'm thinking of my mother, a woman so powerful she traveled back in time to the origin of the human race and, Pandora like, granted us a gift we never wanted: a fear of abandonment so strong we give up before we try. but unlike Pandora, naive and innocent, my mother did it out of spite. she was born a black hole. not a normal black hole, or even a super massive black hole, but the black hole at the center of the universe. she was the Big Bang. she was the originator who became the destroyer. she consumes light, hope, little girls. whole worlds collapse. she is the solar sundew, the eater of flesh, bone, ash. her leavings, lifeless space bodies, aimless carcasses who no longer remember where they came from, who can no longer imagine where they're going. trails of dead stars, fused relics of base metals. she's not like our ancestors, the ancestors of mortals, she's the ancestress of the neutron star that shines only in death, bastard smear of radiation fixed by the eclipsing eye of a camera lost in space. unrelenting. purposeless. the cat that drops the mouse, still warm, she keeps her hands in carved out rib- cages, tent poled to hold up her fitted hide, a wicked pneuma exhaled over a blasted landscape of calcaneus bones never lifted above untrodden paths, leathery alveoli never filled by the only inheritance we were ever offered. why, she might have asked, need they light when they have no eyes? and she ate away the sun. why, she might have asked, need they walk when there is no path? and she ate away their feet. why, she might have asked, need they speak, breathe, crash through, rupture, evolve, awaken, when no elementary particle escapes the spiraling drain, the suffocating death, the translucent fading into a single dimension, into an outline, into an unlimned representation of what never was, a remnant of what never existed? and she gave birth to me.
November 26, 2021
Self expression, however flawed, is a relief.
November 26, 2021
that 6:30 emptiness appeals to me most on autumn days when the aluminum light of dawn is no longer hoisted high by busy bird song, but hasn't yet been blacked out by cloudy catatonia, when my city becomes, for so brief a time, an empty church where i can walk quietly because no one is there, when every brake light and traffic signal is picked out in isolation and the wind blows no trash and the crows can't commit to east or west, but remain wise and unhindered as broken clouds drift in broken bands in slow procession toward the high rises, their destination past the horizon, but i'm gone by then, on a quiet bus, with the windows open, separating seeds from banal contentment, knowing only how fleeting this moment is, in autumn, on my way to work, to hear a lone crow's call.
October 8, 2021
laugh if you want to call me produce lady call me man call me virgin call me Ripley call me lesbo go ahead feel good feel superior laugh that self-satisfied laugh at my expense cause i can afford it now cause your words don't matter anymore to me cause i don't got to compromise anymore cause i don't got to sacrifice myself anymore when i walk out that door at 6am when i talk to myself to keep myself on track when i have a bad day when i got to recite my recitation on the bus to keep myself to myself i can still walk with my head held high burdened only by my warm coat and my lunch bag and my groceries and not anymore by self-hate and shame i'm not ashamed of who i am i'm not ashamed of how i live i don't need anything from you you stranger you unknown don't speak to me don't look at me don't stand near me i don't owe you anything i don't need your permission your understanding your good graces your charity your blessing and you don't need my fake smile my fake laugh my retail face cause that's all i got for you cause i don't need to forgive cause i can't forget it's somewhere in my bones down below the shower drain and the sticky carpet fibers and the warm plastic linoleum i couldn't find it if i wanted to and i don't i just want to keep on walking until i can't walk anymore and when i can't well somewhere inside i know the deal i know her name i'll take it with me i've got five minutes here i am this is all i'll ever be this is more than i've ever been i got what i need i fade it's leaf fall it's rain you feel you can't hear it's winter silence it's time o'clock it's all alone good morning
October 8, 2021
remember, you're meat. you're adipose tissue. you're organs. you're glands. you can be replaced by a machine by a plastic mouth by a whore by a neighbor by a child by an animal by a warm wet hole penned in light draws the eyes to your tits your ass your crotch draws the bull's eye to you, meat. dick plow. human toilet. emptied into. dripping. brains or inhuman smear. fertile abandonment. subject. abject. nothing you do matters. nothing you think matters. nothing matters over meat. not your goals, not your ambitions. not your thoughts. not your art. not your future. you are lobotomized. you are nothing but meat. remember. you aren't a person. you aren't an individual. you aren't autonomous. you aren't free. you aren't powerful. you are meat. remember. with every word, with every look, with every motion. you are nothing. you are meat. you are prey. you are subject, object. internalized meat. remember. there is no beauty. there is no love. whatever you were thinking, whatever you were doing, whatever you were feeling, this is your reminder, meat. none of it matters. you don't matter. you are nothing. you are meat.
October 8, 2021
