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A bee buzzes home
from a day at the office,
shedding flecks of gold.
Your eyes scream at me through your typing
When it is so quiet you can not bear to use your own voice
Begging, pleading…for my skin, your 2 am indulgence
I am tired I tell you
But you claw at the part of me your bedroom thoughts desire
What am I to you?
Skin through a lens…or a “pretty girl”
*WARNING* Poem references suicide. Scroll on if you can’t/don’t want to read.
It’s late,
and so I wonder if she tried
I’ve written the most poems about you.
Every birthday, another poem. You’ve no idea. I’ve never let you
read them. You’ve never asked is what I tell myself
but the truth is you’ve no idea they exist and for this I am grateful.
So many things I will never tell you. The way I sat in the kitchen the afternoon
I told your father I was pregnant. The way light paused in the window frame
as if to ask, “May I come inside?” How small the world suddenly seemed
once I knew you were not yet in it. Your laugh is the most.
Its whirligig echo in the hallway reaches me even now.
Some nights I wake in the small hours of the morning, the light fragile as only light can be
just before the sun’s rise. I think of you finding these poems. I think of one day,
say 40 years from now, how I will be gone and surely your curiosity will win out.
You will sit at the small white desk where I wrote and you will open my laptop.
You will clear your throat. And just there, after opening the folder labeled with your name
your finger will land on its prize. It will be this poem. It is called, “The Night Before Your 16th Birthday I Cry in the Upstairs Bathroom so You Can’t Hear Me.” I think you will choose this poem based on its title,
because you think how sad I must have been watching you grow, year after year
your strong vine inching further away from me.
You never knew the working title was “I Love You #16.” Well, now you know. I wasn’t sad.
I was full. So full I had to spill outside myself.
Moment after moment.
Now blue notes rise like smoke in the crowded hall,
the sudden swish of brush on drum, a forlorn
wail fills up the horn, and now a sweet voice
starts to hum. Piano keys ring like quick
little bells, tinkling up and down the scale
and linger on chords with texture thick as molasses.
Finally, a word passes through the lips of that smooth
singer, who moans a lament for the girl he was meant
to be with. Thuh-THUMP, thuh-THUMP, the thumb of the upright
bass guy plucks the string he damps, and taps
his foot to show he feels the ache of the blues
in his body, like all of us who’ve come here to feel
something. Heal something. Know we’re not alone.
when the music starts, wherever we are, we’re home.
Rage
You come in so fast it takes my breath away
I want to scream into the abyss what a bitch you are
How your ugly presence isn’t welcome
Instead I clench my teeth, hold my breath and give in to its power
I growl like a Lion. Leo the Lion to be exact because that’s what my daughter has named herself
Teeth gnashing, claws tearing its enemies to shreds.
Then I open my eyes again and softly tell her…
Yes, darling it’s time for dinner.
WHAT PANDEMIC? If you went into a coma in January of 2020,
Then you woke up in June of 2021,
Would you know that there had been a pandemic?
What if you were vaccinated while in the coma,
And when you woke up, Joe Biden was President,
Would you know that there had been a pandemic?
What if your family members had not been allowed to visit most of that time,
But when you woke up, they were allowed to be there,
Would you know that there had been a pandemic?
Eventually, when someone told you,
Or you saw or heard it on the news,
Would you have felt that being in a coma had been a blessing?
1.
Nobody in the world knows
that I once put a hole in my wall
after a careless girl cancelled our date
in favor of the the other guy
she’d apparently been talking to the whole time.
Her name is carved into the wall
beneath that hole she made me make,
all hidden from view by a portrait of Jesus,
one day to be repaired
along with all the other damage
this little apartment has endured.
2.
A friend recently had to go to the doctor
with a hand bruised from his own wall.
His mom said of the incident,
Why not punch a pillow next time?
Isn’t that the advice we always received,
to take our rage out on an innocent pillow?
But my problem with pillows is they don’t bite back.
They don’t make noise and they certainly don’t break.
3.
I have discovered
great and euphoric catharsis
in taking an object of molded plastic
or glass
and slamming it
on the tiled floor of my kitchen,
then listening to the rain
of all the fractured pieces
as gravity tries to wrap its mind
around a thing that no longer exists.
4.
A little contrivance,
a disagreement with a friend,
once inspired me
to uppercut a paper towel dispenser
when alone in a public bathroom,
all rage and lust for destruction
squeezed into the strike,
but to my disappointment,
the dispenser remained unscathed.
I did, however,
split a couple of knuckles
drawing out a beauty of blood
I stared at for the rest of the night.
5.
As sores fester and grow
turning even the gentlest touch
into an all out assault,
every abrasion
produces a silent scream
echoing only in my head.
6.
Lord help me.
This is the inside and the outside
coming to a harmony of brokenness
where the people around me
have failed to properly love me.
I am drained of life
by those who take, but never give,
and in that vacuum,
evil stirs
this appetite for destruction,
as if breaking everything around me
will rip the rage from my spirit.
As if surrounding myself with shattered things
will eventually make me feel
a little more whole.
Going through the same door
With two separate lives
I, a musician
You, a light bringer
The question lies the answer
On how much light one must bring
To realize our lives have become mundane.
And peace can only be absorbed through the eyes.
There is something by the laws of living
That makes us want to live fully
Yet a faint shadow grasps its arms
Around our neck wishing us to just stay put.
A future we promised ourselves would be of color and enlightenment
Forged kings into our every word
When our words are only of a beggars dream
Of love and love returning
I am of hope that these writings
Will spark my gentle soul
Into something magical.
That all shall see.
