Tag: 2021

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.

A mother and son.

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

"You look tired."

Are you saying I can't do my job?
Are you saying I shouldn't be here?
Are you saying I'm old, ugly, worn out?

Useless?

("I can't," she said.)

Why do you persist? Insist? I hold up
my head by way of meat and bone.

Isn't that enough?

What else am I supposed to do? To be?

("I can't do this.")

You whose name I know
only from the plastic
rectangle pinned to
your uniform like
mine: "At your
service
since"
it's
not a
prison, a
school, I'm not
here for an interview,
an audition, a loan, a raise,
do I have to smile to assuage
your false concern? ("I can't do
this anymore,") you nobody to
a nobody who just wants to
get through one more
shift, one more bus
ride, one more
alarm, one
more
look
at
a
face
I only
recognize through
long acquaintance
with plum eyes
and bird beak
and slash
mouth
and

(she said, I was told,
she walked away,
no two weeks,
no notice)

I wonder sometimes do I look
different, to them, to their
animal gazes skipping
over me like ruminant
tongues I don't
need "You
look,"

do
you?

("I can't,"
she said,
and

she walked away.

"I can't do this anymore."

Two decades my senior, we bonded
over suicidal ideation and cats and
men we shouldn't have let do what
they did and a mutual revulsion
for our own sex. "I can't do this,"
she said. "I can't do this
anymore."
and

she

gave me a gift, a definition of love.

"It makes me happy,"
she said, "to see you happy."

she

gave me a number, to the suicide
hotline she'd dialed the year be-
fore, torn from a magazine,
with a pretty picture on
the other side, a sea-
shell among bright
berries, so I wove
it into a collage,
and so poetry
is collage,
and so
I was
inspired

by
her,

by
my
first
work
friend,
before I
understood
the difference,
before I understood
the difference, I loved her.

she

didn't
waste words
on bitterness or
despair, she got out
of bed every day to show
up, to lift up, without complaint,
to let dark humor and sacrifice
roll us through concrete mornings.

That's why I didn't waste words,
that's why I got out of bed,
every day, to show up,
to lift up, my wonder-
ful young people,
to meet them
where
they
were,
and
so

I
was
loved
in return.

She will never
know how much she
meant to me, to my future.

I met my friends, my son, I met
the only life I ever want, head
on, straight through, be-
cause of her,
because
I met
her.)

I am so grateful.

I have a home.
I have a job.
I have a family.

("I can't" she said.

I miss her.

"I can't do this anymore.")

and

she walked away,
to where, and how,

I will never
know.

September 17, 2021

how
do you
know when

it's raining?

do you see
do you feel
the drops
the contrast
the atmosphere

hear
the
impact

pat pat pat

does your tongue
taste the trans-
formation of
water 
hot
earth
concrete
damp grass
prickle

underfoot
or

is it
the
quiet-

ing of bird
song sizzle of
rubber sheer-
ing arc of
water

does
your knee
ache do you
draw the curtains
or do you open
the door turn
off the
fan

close

your
eyes does
it matter
to you
or

are
you deep

in artificial
light and cool
commercial
cave

how
do you
know when

it's raining?

September 1, 2021