New Day Darning

                                                                                                                            

In my mind

I can see a hand

stitching, like my grandmother's,

her weary eyes squinting

in concentrated effort.

The thimble makes the slightest

yet completely satisfying

*tink*

rhythmically against the needle’s eye.

I fear there’s not enough line to finish

and there will be one too many knots

and stops and starts and tired tired tired.

Yet the thread pirouettes,

reversing with the same planted spaces,

familiar X patterning coming to roost

along the hopeless halves of a torn dream

surgically reuniting

whether they like it or not.

In my mind

I have the power…

my grandmother's chalky bones

scattered somewhere,

gathering

into an intravenous potion

injectable through that needle

darning a broken heart

that will not mend.

The Politics of Peace

I found the one sunny spot
in a yard, long with gray.
Sitting here, the warmth envelops me
as if nature had the arms of a mother.

The fountain bubbles on
practically frothing with intel,
spouting tall tales of long fish
as the starving minnows gather
for tidbits and trivia, peddled as evening news.

Crows hold heated debates
that course through me in stereo
right ear, left ear, right, left, wing.
Politics was never really very clear
and I haven't the temperament to care
not with the sun...just so,
the air ripe with nurture and the lettuce pushing up
as proud and determined as any armed guard.

I leave you the city
if you'll just leave me the yard love!
Everything we built, all the structure
the inroads paved, the fortune...
the square footage, and our four high top bar stools.
Consider them bequeathed.

I've never really asked for a single thing
that came from the part of me that so needed to make requests,
but I'll give you everything that came with this nomination,
Your Honor.
Just leave me the garden.

One-Two Punch

They say it's the old one-two punch.

THE JAB: Something horrible happens, or has been happening, or is about to happen. Maybe the dreadful-awful-very bad thing has been happening so long that you assumed it was just the way life happens for everyone...that it was "normal" to feel stuck and trapped and small...that the panic that lived under your first layer of skin was the very smallest part...and all the gory details and horror flick frames were actually lurking in deeper sub dermal layers, cloaked in some kind of anonymity that posed as faulty wiring. And then one day maybe you realized "normal" was anything but, or you reached the point where "normal" was gonna be the end of you so you might as well leap from the cliff and grasp at the rope swing. The miss and fall was always a possibility, but you never thought the rope would reach out and hang you.

THE CROSS: You decide to hope...a sliver beam of "if I tell, it will end" and this last possibility grows like a sunflower until it is tall and strong and facing only light. Maybe you ditch school and hop a bus. Maybe your fists are clenched so tight you can barely release the quarter. The sound it makes rattling down into the receptacle is so loud you flinch, thinking it will sound the alarm. "The" alarm. You notice that "the" alarm is always poised to strike. Flower to sun. Flower to sun. Flower to sun. Turn. The bus stops and you manage the longest most hopeful two steps taken since the first moon walk....at least it feels that way. With the heat at your back...the sun..the strength..you are propelled.

The building is imposing. The elevator smells oily. The secretary is startled, having seen your photo gaining height throughout the years but never expecting the image to open doors. You are ushered in.

Afterwards, as you lay on the floor, the wind knocked out of any sail that stupid sunflower had dared to unfurl, the boat begins to sink. The bitch of it is, that it really was easier before you thought there was a boat. Before hope...before the only person who might hold the magic power turned it against you. "You are at fault. Therefore, it is."

Only decades later did you realize the weakness of the power. It shrunk in the presence of evil, and evil was all there was back there. The only power available to you had been in re-writing the story...until you ran out of paper, or ink, or metaphor. Then evil catches up and the power has to come from your broken bones...reset....healed...stronger. Maybe it was the last time you went to your father for help, and rightfully so. You can get your punches elsewhere, much cheaper.

Labyrinth of the Blind (description of a depressive episode)

I am throwing peanut shells in the fire
like kindling
like gossip
the kind of dry, unsubstantiated fodder
that hungry flames feed on.

I'm getting tipsy on gin and limes,
the moon-shine of full agreement.
Clouds are forming a canopy of heavy blankets
woven with depressive fibers.
It's almost as if someone loving
is laying them across my shoulders
as if they were made for me
as if they were comforting.
But reality seems an ocean, black and bottomless.
The corners of my mouth are cement shoes
and this night is a potter's field.

If I occupy the darkness...
let loose my attachment to the illumination I can find,
I will be lost
and only a deity can find me there,
in the ink spot,
the labyrinth of the unseeing.

Crayons In The Wind

Every now and then, there's a stiff wind...the kind that can measure rooms with its cavernous roar. It knocks you senseless sometimes, even though you have both feet dug in, and your hands are firmly anchored to the railing of your stone wall.

I had some crayons once. So many beautiful colors, and with them I drew love that birthed rosy cheeked children walking bushy tailed dogs. I drew a life line that traveled down my plump young hand and into a crepe paper version of itself with an arthritic knuckle.

I thought I had the tools.

My fingers are cold. They make a play for pockets that are full of snotty tissues and fumble there with the tattered remnants of a memory seam or two. The surface of my skin ripples like the sea and I can only guess where time has gone. The wind. The wind took it. You see I forget that there is a breezeway as big around as the mighty oak that once held a tire swing. I forget that the creaking isn't the sweet melody of child's play, but the rattle of space inside my soul. There are things that are missing. Things that have always been missing. Things as fundamental as a mother, and a father. It takes a while to realize why there's always a breeze.

Every now and then, there's a stiff wind...the kind that throws up a mirror to your parlor tricks and illustrates the backstitch of an illusion. My crayons had no box, no structured frame with a cylindrical opening to whittle them into fine points. They just wore down with my scribbles and kept on going.

I have a sense now, of what I might have done if only I could have sharpened my tools and filled in the hollow where air escapes.

I might have caught my breath.

Every now and then, something howls through a void you forgot you had, maybe didn't even know you had, and it rocks you with legitimacy. I'm not placing blame. I'm just giving a structure of compassion to the wind.

Tight at the Throat

To hold that boulder between your teeth
to talk around it...work, jog
kiss with it between your lips
the ache growing
porcelain chipping away
silence chiseling into an insurmountable resolve.

What physical weight could you hold this long?
Why do you feel your heart stronger than your exoskeleton?

And when you finally released that mountain
let it flow downhill
picking up the steam you've imagined will render us
cartoon flat
bloodless...
it wasn't a boulder at all
that postured at the foot of us.
It was just a truth rising up like bile,
like childbirth
it could not be held back
else the child stillborn
and the mother dead also.

It ached for breath and faith
so that when it rolled to the base of us expelled
we would overshadow it.
"it"
this thing you feared say for so long
while building its walls and pouring its foundations,
hunkering down inside that fort
claiming safety.

It wasn't safe.
It was just self preservation
eating you alive

And The Reality Is

it will be a day like any other.
The sun will rise
and the clock will tick one moment into the next
with the smallest of sounds in the emptiest place.

Your bad knee will ache no more, no less
than the day preceding, or the day next.
The garden flowers will still have color
so incrementally fading that unconscious denial is an easy mask
over the fact they are dying along with you.
In fact it feels like everything outside is vibrantly alive
and loud
and big.

People will say "hello"
and you'll fight being incredulous.
Don't they know?
Isn't it obvious to everyone
that the ground is about to open beneath your small, unsteady feet
and you down into the mouth of it
with nothing left on the curb of the earth
but a belch to this monumental thing...
this un-doing.

But you are not un-done
simply unraveled more, and spun
down to the spool
the barest of things
the end of yourself,
and there is nothing wrong with that dear.
From the quiet and stillness of you will grow a sound
and the sound will build note by note
discordant at first
but none the less musical.

Oh that magical day
when you break out into song again.
Sing loud love.
Those notes were hard to come by
and well out of your range
before.