So Broken
The heart: a place of understanding,
the doorway of divine wisdom,
the center of transformation.
Journey from the mind to the heart, she says.
Can I get there? My pure heart is so broken.
A broken heart:
it comes from a hardened heart, they say.
Did my heart get hardened?
Maybe so. To survive.
No way out?
You are not being fair.
Brought your cultural misogyny
to your new position.
Let me leave you before
I explode and my shrapnel
weakens your perceived loss of power.
Too busy judging women.
Unaware their words armed your defense.
Do you know who this is?
That person I’m supposed to be.
I’d rather spend my time writing about it.
In that space I’m safe.
I’m tired of putting on a fake face,
holding my tongue.
I lived to write about it.
I listen and watch what people say and do.
I am the Finder and Authenticator
unable to trash or delete my memories.
I write this for both of us.
4 my words the bridge.
That’s it!
It’s not work it’s art.
Both pushing the other
in opposite directions.
Yes, that’s exactly where
I want you!
Last week I got off my pins,
had a pedicure, a massage.
You know what pins are for.
So, let us line up, prep,
take stations to divide the labor.
Production has begun its practice.
One to unroll
One to straighten
One to cut
One to point
One to grind the head
and so on.
Yawn.
A perfect dream in the economy
of my head, I lift my toes,
neither Italian or Rose;
I blush and pinkly stand.
That is me in his visible hand.
Dusk caps its pen over another finish
Running in the legal sense only
my legs weave exhausted metaphors
sweat from my T soaks me
in my self-perceived mediocrity
My feet touch the pavement
like crumpled poems
tossed to the park floor
There is no more within me
Until I see the finish line ahead
and I fall into the arms
of sweet race volunteer
a walking talking muse
who wraps me in a foil blanket
letting my memory rest
(I fell in love with her a little)
Though the race is done at last
the time poor
the pace slow
the miles trekked and cold
safe in my foil blanket
I see how far I have come
I live in more than videotapes,
carry a new hope so palpable
that I cannot speak on the train.
My mouth filled with sunshine
some days ago,
I’ve been waiting
to exhale for a long, long time.
I let the scenery
tear me
apart,
I build houses with my eyes,
they rise quiet from the coastline
like bright omens,
like angel’s shadows.
And I believe
in many things now,
I believe in you,
and I’d crawl back carelessly
to the privacy of my own shut mouth,
if I didn’t find that to be another way
to lose you.
Instead
I journey guiltless to the sun,
lord knows I need it, love,
and I’m not the only one.
Nobody can filter out the grief, rather
publicize my peace instead,
please,
let it live here,
in the garden.
There are always more petunias,
so don’t cry over annual mournings,
don’t cry that the city will not listen
from continents away,
let the wind
shuttle secrets, let them remain secret.
The world is never gonna be empty again,
promising,
I’ll come back to it,
touching fossils on my dresser tabletop,
touching my own damn skin,
a place
where a different sun once kissed.
I will be loved again,
this is not just a wish.
The May flowers in my yard baptized by April
showers have endured
June, but one by one they submit to July’s all-consuming,
green. The lilacs were the first to go, their honeyed
ambrosia too heavenly for a humble
bricked-in bed. The roses, once crowned with ruby
petals, have balded to paltry stems
bowing beneath sun’s heat. The peonies
shed their boisterous blossoms, now only blackened
shreds so delicate a finger’s brush could disintegrate their shriveled
softness. A few valiant primroses
speckle my front garden, but even they wilt. I inhale their citrus-
steeped earl grey scent, so I can memorialize their sweet perfume.
Poetry is a flower that buds but does not wither. It does not languish
without June’s nourishing soil, though July’s loam is not so fertile; it sprouts
elsewhere, in pockmarked
pages, long car rides, listless
clouds, sparkling sunbeams, tinkling
laughter, streetlamps so ornately carved they murmur of otherwordly
forges. While I wait for next Spring’s bloom, I will find
poetry blossoming in every vacated
sidewalk crack because poetry
is our most resilient perennial,
inexorable, ineffable.
Thunder growls all through the night
as I lie awake with worry about
my tabby cat, Oscar
At nearly sixteen years old
he valiantly carries
himself minus a leg and
uneasily lugs loads of fear
of storms and loud noises
A part of me wants to growl
too in the dark
Someone must be strong
ergo I sob in silence
A most joyous day it will be
when Oscar hops back home
My girls say in the future
he’ll never be allowed
outside lest he become
lost once more and a storm
of sorrow rumbles through them
Someone must be strong
but may it be so that my next
softly falling tears be those of gladness
haiku: nina simone’s cover
i can’t listen to
her “here comes the sun” right now.
it’s winter in me.
