Each mask a motive and directive,
Every facet flawed and triumphant,
In some grand ambivalence.
Willow wood heart wormbit,
Tongue turned to ash in a minute,
We’re guilty as crows in a murder.
I have read the records of these resigned prayers and requems,
I know every thorn is a crown waiting to be born,
Every rose a disdainful look;
Each passage a step,
Sometimes backwards,
Where even bloomheavy blessings belie a blight,
But believe me when I tell you
I love this.
Vodka for breakfast.
I miss you, tiramisu
I reminisce about the times my tongue kissed you
swallow,
chew,
absent are the smiles from the baker too
are you ever replacing things you’re accustomed to?
does my absence also fluster you?
I ate custards and fondue
but they just wouldn’t do
Sierra where you?!
I miss the baker who baked the best tiramisu
tw: nonconsentual touch mention
Every day I go into work I pray that you’ll walk in the door
Knowing that if you did, my stomach would drop and I would get sick
Most nights you’re in my dreams
Haunting me, hurting me
Tracing your fingers over my skin
As I whisper “please, stop”
An intimate moment for you
A traumatic one for me
I hear your name and I tremble
Being back in the room from when I was a child has hurt me more than I think I realize
I think of you more than I used to
It’s like you linger in the air here
Even though I’ve tried to scrub it free of you
It’s like you’re haunting me
Every moment I turn around expecting you to be there
Hoping for you to be there
Dreading the fact that you might be one day
I feel like I had finally glued myself back together
It’s like I had finally started making progress
But you clawed your way back into my head
I’m yearning for just a touch of relief
My body aches at the thought of your touch
My stomach churns at the notion that you’re still out there
Maybe happy
Maybe not
But either way, there’s no winning for me
I want you to disappear off the face of the earth
Of the scope of my mind
I wish you had never happened
Then maybe everything would be okay
Then maybe I’d feel good again
Even though I’m living in my parent’s house
Then maybe I could fall asleep without the fear that I’ll hear your voice in my dreams
Even though I can’t remember what it sounds like
Then maybe I wouldn’t be hurting like this
-even masochists would be gentler than this
Got in town last night,
and I’ll leave today by dinner.
I’ve already met with his lawyer,
so once this room is gone over,
keepsakes for his grandkids
packed to remember him by,
it’ll be back on the highway home.
Or maybe not so quickly.
I might need some extra time.
I’ve found the steno pad,
the one he and his doctors,
the priest and few visitors,
relied on for conversation
when the deafness was complete
and he couldn’t hear his own pain.
At the top of the last-used page,
in the script of his favorite nurse,
the one who cried when she
tried to hug our shared sorrow away,
How are you today, Carl?
And in his childish, crude letters,
all he had left with memories gone,
I’m dieng
she asks what he does all day.
how to tell the doctor’s mean
nurse that he spends afternoons
alone, in a wooden chair
placed on a flat stone
just beyond the sweeping
curve of the stream’s current
confined to the latex
undertone of the exam room
belly up on a starchy sheet
she squeezes his left nut
with her right hand…barks
turn your head and cough,
enough is enough
he, as he sometimes does, leaves
his body, flies away to his chair
by the surging creek
nurse ratchet exits
and the long wait for the doctor
begins, he sleeps and dreams
that he’s a guardian angel
watching his younger self splash
naked into icy water shouting
Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night
he wants to whisper Stop
into his own youthful ear
but knows, that even in a dream,
he cannot
he sees himself showing off
to a young woman he barely knows
her perfectly round breasts
her red shorts damp from his spray
he’s pulling her arm
she’s shaking her head NO
and yanks her arm back
she wont take his damn test
and she’s not
standing on that river bank
for a minute longer
waiting for him to grow up
I hear a sound with body, a great whale,
A giant ship, a sinewed vessel
Undulating in vicious clouds.
It’s mechanisms creak
And echo
Returns back to me.
I am alone in the whale.
Its mouth is a thousand miles wide.
And I sit with the long fingers which filter krill.
Too big to be swallowed
Too small to be bothered
Its dark and you are not with me.
Sometimes I think I hear them, the ones who lived here
before me. The old man found dead in the bedroom
two days after his only friend last heard from him,
the apartment swaddled in cat hair. The young man
who died of AIDS & whose mother planted yellow roses
in his memory that bloom by my front steps each spring,
gone by early summer. The old friend who sheltered here
after her divorce, then welcomed her ex-husband so often
that she remembered why she loved him, & married him again.
The single moms whose rowdy kids trashed the place,
the single dads who drank & chain-smoked every night,
coating the bedroom walls with nicotine & soot.
The old man snoring as his naps get longer & longer,
the young man pacing the hallway & sleeping less & less,
the old friend sighing as the gentleman caller in her bed
touches her in all the old places in a whole new way.
Decades after their forwarding addresses have expired,
I still get their mail. Return to sender, I scrawl. No longer
at this address. But the truth is that we’re all here together,
roommates for life & then some, keeping each other company.
Goose gray, early June,
the hollyhocks stand taller
even the grass in
its slow way whispers thanks. Peace
unto all when rain drops fall.
