GPA
The notion of a
4.0 weighs heavy on
My shoulders. Slacker!
For what will you give your day
an extra special yay?
Receive loving kisses.
A hard rain you missed.
Hearing your favorite song.
Nothing you did going wrong.
Feeling a comfortable breeze.
Thanks from a friend that you pleased.
Something beautiful to see.
Sincere thanks from someone you pleased.
Hearing your favorite song
and singing along.
So many pleasures that may
give your day a big A.
The nightmares roosted in my chest but did not leave
when the morning light bled in, when the days turned.
My desperate mother cannot massage the blood back
into my extremities, cannot kindle a spark within my eyes.
Kill switch my brain silently. There is no post traumatic.
This wire is live, an exposed nerve. Let me dig it out,
bare down on the electrocution. I seize, my jaw clenched,
scratching off invisible hands, severing reality into a memory.
I can talk about it until that one point. Then I’m left incoherent.
Then there’s no point in poetry. Nothing could describe it,
that feeling, the unadulterated horror that never pales,
never becomes tolerable. I regurgitate the same terror
but I can never digest it, it just burns through me, images
corroding, impossible to rationalize, impossible to live with.
The notion of madness is always lurking,
A black shadowman, a wailing banshee,
A folklore Hide-Behind. It is the ball and
Chains and I’m the Christmastime ghost –
The holidays are always especially, after all.
There is an uncertainty in whether or not
It was born spontaneously, or the product of a cursed person from a wicked family.
There was a face in the trees today,
Round and green like an oak life.
He did not meet my gaze, just scowled off
Into the distance, his head a round bulb
Of a nose and frown like a dead fish
Pulled from the deep to the surface.
When I was 20, some switch flipped on
In my brain and I started screaming and
Crying at random because it felt like I was going
to die, like everything was awful, and
I could not sleep.
I started to see dark, wiggling lines
In my room, or crawling shapes in the corner
Of my eyes.
I took pills to knock me unconscious for 14 hours.
I still don’t know if that was just destiny, or the result of a stressful school schedule.
The green man went away and no matter
How hard I try to find him in the patterns
Of the leaves, I cannot find him again.
Days slip by faster than the
kids going down the waterslides
these days. These days the
summer heat creeps upon me
too quickly to run away. Run
away is what the runners and
bikers try to do from the
humidity in the mornings. In
the mornings coffee is freshly
brewed in an attempt to wake
up the people. The people lose
time too fast to overthinking
and realize the days are slipping
away from us like grains of sand.
Kids who are abused
are often confused.
They think
that they
are to blame,
blurring
the reason
to gripe
or complain,
they continue
to suffer in silence.
After Jane Hirshfield’s “I am asked a question.”
What have I done with my life, my one wild and precious life?
There is no better question.
I love the sound of this one,
the way wild balances precious.
My life has an answer.
But my life speaks a strange tongue.
There is much I don’t know.
I do know how to hang on, and how to think.
Perhaps I can learn to hear what my life says.
Perhaps I won’t need to choose
or to understand.
I go out into the misty rain.
Fine droplets on my face don’t slow me down.
I can dry off back home.
(italicized phrase is from Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day”)
When the boys aren’t home,
I can come down for coffee
without strapping down these old dugs,
or finding a huge shirt.
When the boys aren’t home,
I watch horrifying news
without worrying about them
having some hard questions.
When the boys aren’t home,
I savor the solitude
without feeling a lot of guilt,
and have another cup.
When the boys aren’t home
I worry about those two
without any good reason to
and listen for the door.
(after a postcard from Emily)
Cleaning out his bedroom closet
she worked her way
through his wool suits
to the top shelf
where she found the shed skin
of some long ago squatter,
a black snake must have once
made its home here
behind a shaky stack
of his leather-bound journals
Without looking
at the date on the cover
she pulled one out
and opened to a random page:
All day I watch the nest
under the eaves of the kitchen porch
where five fledgling swallows
flit about tryng to achieve flight,
though old I feel like one of them
as if they and I are of the same nature
and as if that nature
were nothing but love
She had been here in December
to nurse a cut on his leg
from a minor fall. She left
with no plan of return.
He died the first day of spring
in his sleep
alone
and on his own — his way
Age 97
When she finished
cleaning his house
she couldn’t remember
how to lock the door
