Posts for June 19, 2022 (page 8)

all things break
all things can be mended
not fixed as if never broken but repaired
with intention
even if one part is unaware of the calculations
sunrise beach
north
six hours
then three more
boys 3/4
plus ones X two
dogs half
not mine
he stayed home with her
dropped parts
I don’t want to pick up those pieces
the present holds all of my attention
except maybe a niggling part
1/10th
or 1/100th
weary of that section that make up this hole
I created
I will find intention
that is what I do
anymore
that-
wisdom that is
sometimes just age-
somewhere along the roadside
when wheels turn to the equation I 
wouldn’t even call this data worthy of a poem
though
it is necessary to work it out in longhand
so there you have it

Chin arrested between
arm wrapped knees back
against the wall again
crash landed and crying.  

Catch, kiss, release
a muttered mantra
of hopelessness.  

Stop.
You never needed
holding to be complete.
Catch, kiss, laugh.
Lather, rinse, repeat.

* Warning: this poem contains brutality 

Veronica & I languished
like bougainvillea across her four
poster that summer, the window

unit humming. I carefully braided
her waist-long hair. She’d brush
through strands of my red-blonde

tresses. Wispy, they tangled
into thick matted balls so knotted
Veronica borrowed her mom’s

dressmaker shears and clipped
them out like removing
an old boyfriend from family

pictures. The Beatles broke
up that year. Manson cranked
his dark music box. In my high

school lanky still-growing
boys got draft lottery
numbers. We were teen

girls & knew we’d never choke
on Agent Orange, never scurry
through the jungle

to a booby trap death. There was
a downside. Whether we were
the color of peeled

birch or wild cherry
many were not nice
to women. At 19, I found

out. Our innocent four-poster
ramblings came to brutal
conclusion after I was bludgeoned

with a boot heel, dragged
to an urban construction
site, raped & left to die.

You ask for my thoughts on what I see, my opinion, mademoiselle, is you put a spell on me

Pink jazz flesh apples in the uptown cabarets smoking
where we prayerfully incline to hear the silent sound 
of the main riff coming through the clouds, a thread 
of Chinese silk in a painting draped as cloth around my legs. 
The colors, sun rising over peacocks and manicured tropic trees, 
green oranges and tigers sleeping. 
I am a dormouse become Alice the Goon brainstorm-sifting 
an overstocked pantry, where the bread is crust and hard, 
expired cans swim with soup, vegetable and barley. 
And when you said I reminded you of a cross 
between García Lorca and John Berryman traveling green 
in the moonlit direction of my fears, still organizing the pantry, 
seeking for true bread that is soft, the cans awash with true soup, 
vegetable and barley, I meekly squeeked for all that is freshly green, 
and blathered, I’m a cow giving milk and making spinach pies 
in total love of you.  I do not care that you hate me 
with every sinew you can lift. I want your yellow mane, 
sapphires green, the merry laugh that drove me to wed you then, 
and my coming to you in the heat.

I’m certain if the distance
We have been apart from each other
were to be stretched out end to end
And then let to bounce back (like the phone chord I pulled across the hallway so I could talk to you in my closet, coiled and kinked up in places) it would still take my love for you to the moon and back