Posts for June 10, 2019 (page 5)

He broke my heart,
the boy with the button-down-collars,
razor-creased jeans,
shoes so shiny he could see my panties.

I thought I recovered.

After graduation, waving like royalty,
I left school in a candy-apple-red convertible,
beside a darker version of the heart-breaker. 

We married and everything seemed right 
until the baby-blues got to me.
I lead death’s hand onto the shotgun.

I was born into a southern gothic,
father  mad, obese brother,
nympho sister,
with Mother trying
to hold it all together.

Wisely, my husband left town with my son.
Years later, he, my son, looked for me
among my aging in-crowd friends.

The one who killed me said he never knew me.

Such passion,
must be sex or territory,
the repeated piercing
screams coming from
the hawk perched high
in the pine.
With a puffed-up breast,
he scolds belligerant
over and over
powerful enough
to make his authority known.

Then a squirrel appears squawking
on the same limb
and pushes him, drives him off–
home town advantage.

Hawk glides away screeching
then circling back–
the bravado
of one last dive,
one last bluff.

Do you mean to tell me I have stumbled?
I was only using every resource in reach to walk.

That should earn something; You.

The Potter knows his clay better than that clay knows its purpose once it’s a cup.

I felt quite thorny, full of wheels
and empty spots, limp from looking
over the edge, a battlefield terribly torn.
I made up my mind to try my own cure
but I couldn’t go into it broken.

The world hurts, too many folks taking
pieces of me. I am here and I am not here,
a shell with a floating middle. I need
to breathe in my own way, get out
where the world is big and quiet.

I want to paint rich saturated pigments,
a language of line, a breathing
color reaching for violet and purple.
I want to paint fat-looking fig trees,
a lush soft green feel of birds,
a sweet stillness warm pink and lavender,
the Rio Grande River running
red from rains, bulging
out of the canvas.

Something is happening in me.
I am beginning to feel
as if I have dozens of selves,
all creation going through me
unfolding, blossoming—
a sled tearing downhill,
a piece of fast-burning wood.

But I am only a scrap,
little more than a thread
of the circle that nothing can break,
the desert stretching on and on
like the ocean, dark. Maybe blackness
is the pure thing after all—
the thing you cannot soil.

~ Cento of lines/phrases found in “My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz: Volume One, 1915-1933 .”

It’s been two years
and you still come to me in visions,
in some prophecy I can’t fucking understand,
with arms open,
reaching out across the wide, empty sea.

There are no words to say to your memory
that don’t infringe on cliché; I’ve said them all,
I’ve said them in the bitter darkness of midnight depression,
I’ve cried out for you in the blazing light of a summer day.
I hope you can hear me

as I hear you,
one or two words in your voice, warm and jovial like butterscotch,
woven into the conversations of strangers.

It breaks me down;
I still love you.
You inhabit a hollow place in my heart
reserved for only the greatest of men.
You were always my exception.
In life and death,
you are loved, my angel.
You are loved.

I wrote I Love Amanda in barbeque

sauce on top of a beef and potato

casserole and slid the dish into the oven

I wanted you to taste my heart     wanted you

to see it scorched into a tablet of unripe cheese

and grease     wanted it to stick to your ribs

but when I pulled the casserole from

the heat I found that the words had

spilled out across the entire surface

just as well

if there is anything that cannot

be bound by words     anything

that cannot be confined by language

it is how much of you I carry in me

as much as the sky carries stars

Things are different here, where consonants
are vowels dressed in overalls. The heat
doesn’t know another way to be but oppressive, flattening

your hair and will in equal measure. Here kudzu and ghosts
grow wild, blooming in the rising damp when no one is watching,
and hand-sewn quilts flair over every counterpane like exotic patchwork birds.

They all have a story, a brush with death or misery shaped and formed
at the bassinet. Mothers come with nicotine-stained comfort,
necks smelling of clean white soap, hard-worked hands

never stilled by age or idleness. Here is
the culmination of ceaseless energy, sunburned arms
and humid sweat the chapters of their own books.

You’ll see the elderly on porches, watching with avid interest
in their watery eyes as life teems around them. Their strength is born from loss, blue hands gripping at the arms of a youth

just to feel closer to the years they’ve shed.
Nostalgia becomes fear becomes mania.
They peer constantly from windows framed in yellowing curtains,

trying to ascertain what they’re missing
and for how long. Some of them keep
shrines to the dead in basements and attics.

Some of them hang photos beside rocking chairs,
curved cane and smell of moths. And some keep hair and bone, teeth and nail, reminders of what they will become.

silence is a shadow
in which we like to hide.
we whisper words
and ruin our rage.
but it’s somehow worse
when they can’t 
fill the shoes
of the giant
you made them out
to be.

Surrounded by two neighbors
Both whom I admire 
One is quite liberal 
The other quite not. 

Both like long conversations 
Of politics and religion 
Of the greatness of Trump
Of the evil of Trump.

One likes fine whine 
The other good bourbon 

I listen and remain silent 
Subconsciously agreeing
With the one who shares the bourbon. 

Now that we’ve had no standards for sixty years

And no one can fail

Earned a degree that requires no math or critical thinking

A’s awarded only when the kool-aid is properly regurgitated

Try to be honest

Stalin is your best choice

With that little pussy Che for Vice