Tag: poetry

everything about me
you said

you liked
everything about me

(i lied)
i said
i'd lost
your number

i showed you a picture
of myself playing hockey
long hair
big smile
thirty years
before
and now?
you said

but
i disbelieved

clumsy buzzcut
lines on my face

your name
your naked feet
you said
your name was Nick

i disbelieved
but i remembered.

July 6, 2018

my fingertips
smell
like garlic
like cooking
like a knife
and a pan
like they never did
when i was fed
through the bars
of a cell with
no walls
so i don't mind
when my fingertips
smell
like garlic

March 26, 2019

there's a meme about grandmothers
are you happy?
are you fed?
are you loved?
i find it wonderful and
absurd
why would anyone care
if i am happy?
if i am fed?
if i am loved?
how much simpler
it would have been
if my father had
succeeded
in cutting off my air
a little longer
holding on
a little longer
until
no one else would have had to
put up with me had to
be disappointed in me had to
hate me
i can't leave now
though
what's the use of surviving
if i'm only going to
go away again?
i am not happy
but i can find
happiness
on my own
in my own
way
i need a chance
to feed myself
an opportunity
and then they can all breathe
a sigh of relief
"thank god she's gone"
and talk about me behind my back
and lie to my face
"of course we love you"
and hate you and
humiliate you and
stand aside while
you are hated and
humiliated
there's nothing pure
in human affection
it's crowded about
with insecurities
and despair
and unkept promises
i'll take
friends over lovers
lovers over family
cats over everyone
it makes me happy
to make them happy
it's what keeps me
here
still
trying

January 28, 2018

I don't speak in riddles.
I speak in convolutions of
labyrinthine digression.
I'm not sad.
I look askance
to give
myself
time to borrow
a happier frame.
I'm not devious, though
I am a liar.
I can be noble,
perhaps courageous.
In time.

July 3, 2018

i live an improvisational life
in between
bouts of depression.
bravado shelters me
like a tarp in a hurricane.
no glass
just boards spray-
painted with pithy slogans.
fun fact: my father tried to
kill me when i was sixteen.
interested yet?
twenty years spent treading water
is no substitute for a life.
five ten
hot flashes and a bad temper
lines on my face sculpted by dysphoria
embraced too late by
forty years
too late by thirty-two hundred miles.
i write like i'm starving
hunched over a machine
bringing up gouts of words
like wound fever in reverse.
i never know if i'm doing it right
but a key with no lock
can still be a pretty thing.
i live an improvisational life
in between
one breath
and the next.

January 13, 2018

Two parental figures turned away.

Smooth, frictionless.

Blank walls.

Immovable.

Immobile.

Quiet as death.

Neither speaking.
Neither listening.

Unavailable.

Unavoidable.

Until I walk away.

Out from underneath.

Out from in between.

Into silence.

Into a place where I can breathe.

Where I can speak.

Where I can hear my voice.

Like an echo.

Trailing behind me.

A wasted sound.
           Of words no longer spoken.

August 8, 2015

Where is my joy?
It's flown away again,
fickle creature.
I should learn how to trap and shoot.
Emotional taxidermy.
So lifelike!
Only the glassy eyes give me away.

January 17, 2018

lost
in sleep
half awake
dislocated
in space
in time
invisible
body
pivots
at the hips
back and forth
unable to orient

are we facing
the door?
the wall?
the window?
the refrigerator?
where are we
in space?
in time?

until
like sand
after a seismic wave
we settle
back
into our familiar shape
and reality
like dust
floats
on.

November 7, 2019

This is my (parenthetical) life.
A life of multiple-choice questions.
I don't get to write an essay,
explain
entertain
my intersections don't fork,
they bifurcate. 

I saw a billboard, an advertisement.
"It could happen faster than you think."
I couldn't see the meaningful text.
What could happen faster than I think?
Death? Opportunity? AIDS?
The young man looked unhappy.
It must have been AIDS. Or unemployment.
Not a natural disaster. A personal disaster.
All disasters are personal.
We get lost in them,
like a pebble in the tide,
swallowed up
disgorged
upon a foreign shore.

That's where I walk,
along the edge of oblivion. Oblivious.
The land depressives know best.
The place where you're always drowning, but never drown.
Forever in that moment when you can't
breathe,
but never fall all the way in,
because that's where peace is,
where neither breath nor life matter.
A suspended moment
free from the internal scoring etched by
relentless thoughts
of tragedy.
As if one person could contain all that.
As if I'm important enough.
As if I matter.
As if I'm not just one more pebble
in the maelstrom.

Life as a series of multiple-choice questions.
What would I choose?
It's not the answers that matter,
it's the question.
I never see the right question.
I'm always one page off,
working on something
that won't even be on the test.
Even when I'm right,
I'm wrong.

I lie alone at night
trying to solve the puzzle of the past
trying to see the picture.
I always assume there's a picture.
Maybe there isn't.
Maybe I'm making it up.
I see color and shape
where there's only gray.
I make a story.
I have to make a story.
I'm a human being,
that's what we do.
We tell ourselves the story
of ourselves.
That's how we remember
who we are.

Otherwise

we become
nebulous
unanchored
free floating
motes of dust
suspended
in a beam
of sunlight
powered by some external engine
unable any longer to assume
the right of flight
part of the conglomerate of dirt
anonymous
a non entity
compacted into what feeds
the indifferent multitude
above.

Life is not a series of multiple-choice questions.

2015