Posts for 2020 (page 123)

Not that easy to just leave it behind
When memories flash through my head at any given moment
Slaps, boards, cracks, the sound of a voice right before
Cries, screams and laughs
Cold metal table, don’t bump your head
Coughing
Hiding bruises
Hiding thoughts
Motors
Semis
Lighters
Traintracks 
TV’s glow
My childhood was awful
You say “Can’t get over the past if you’re living in the past.” 
But what about when
You’ve tried?
What about when it’s intrusive?
What about when it physically haunts you?
What about when it’s a concrete block
And it’s painful?
Almost more so now than it was then
I guess i’ll just
Get over it
Thanks 

On the forest avenue to Nikkō, surrounded by the cedars’ memories of fallen companions, fears of their own hearts’ mortality, I thought of you gazing from the woods at Gettysburg, reluctant to dare the unknown horrors of the gentle fields, their stone walls and ditches, as if you needed metaphors to describe your marriage. When last I heard from you, you were a year into a five-year plan to desert, unspoken of since announced. I wonder if you laid down your arms in exchange for safety, or if you’re stationed elsewhere now, still under his command, not knowing being all I’ll ever know.

Male motivations
Destroy transgender rights, with
Religious contempt

Discrimination,
Bias of the holy man
When “judge not” is sung

Access denied, as
Gatekeepers proliferate
On corruptions back

Gender fluidity,
Estrogen shapes emotion
In dysphoric hearts

Patriarchy steals
scales from lady justice, while
Burning pride once more

And in the moments before
I hit the water,
there was a struggle
between the river and the sky.

I felt myself falling
and yet,
I was more aware
of the air around and within me.

The moment was fleeting,
but I swear to you that
I lingered in that humidity
for a lifetime.

Flecks of coal
Along dead tracks
Breathing old dust

The rail is change
Brighter than a drop of Mercury
Virginal steel

Transcend the body
Whisper to God
We will be one

In the flit of a hummingbird’s wings,
Someone can die in your eyes.
A flutter of lips that clings
And forms a sty.

Like a featherless chick falls from a beam,
Never again to lift its still-blind head,
One weak stitch pops the seam
And unravels the thread.

There is no back
To go once the path splinters
And rain dissolves your mutual track.
You have to leave behind what hinders.

Excise the spider’s bite-
It only did what spiders do,
So do not lapse into futile spite
And walk away from who you outgrew.

Acrid smell that lit on fire my nose
One eye black as a marble
Blood, a rope like puddle of insides
Never did I realize
The tininess of a squirrel hand
I was 6
My eyes grew
My pupils black like that marble
Though nervous, but curious
My hand moved to its fur
A dead thing
Yet fur smooth as silk
I wanted to see
If a heartbeat existed
Amongst a carcass of cracked bones
And tire burnt skin
I had almost touched
The little stripe down it’s back
She grabbed my hand
As if I were about to touch fire
A little bone popped
I cried with guttural instinct
She was more afraid
Of a dead squirrel
Of disease, visceral nausea in her guts
She tugged me away
Tears streaming down my cheeks
Not a word of my wrist
Never looked back at the squirrel
Let him lie there
Cars to continue to break
Bones on a pavement
As black as his marble eye

(after Lesley Wheeler)

Ruthlessly pruning the overstuffed closet,
I make room for the new. I cannot emphasize
enough how out of character this is, but then

again, I am on the verge of so many changes.
This time next year we can’t yet visualize, so yes!
We must be pitiless. The future is roaring toward us.

https://lesleywheeler.org/2014/08/25/ruthlessly-pruning-the-overstuffed-closet-of-a-poetry-book-manuscript/

He spoke like a seashell; that’s 
why she thought she heard the ocean. 

Control is a Gods lie,
Control is a devils truth.
What is found in the white ether,
Is humanity untethered.
Birth by sleep,
Death by waking.
The mind made up by greater parts,
Is undone by the power of the sum.
The alcoholic pride,
In the world built reassuring.
In the wee small hours,
When we betray ourselves.
We are all but Gods and devils.