Broken precious things

Broken things
Broken precious things
So busted you can't remember what
they looked like before

Doesn't matter if you broke them
or if someone else did
Doesn't matter if you gave
precious things
to someone to break
or if they took them

You just don't have the currency
to fix them completely
Every time you notice they're
broken
You remember

All you can do is learn to love
Broken precious things

Brave

I do not flinch
Boxes of metal things
fall off of shelves
and my heart doesn't jump
a single beat
I do not blink
Random hands flail in front
of my eyes
and I am not scared
not at all
But I am not brave
I cry sometimes
not because of what I feel
because I don't feel anything
at all

Altered Beast

Always a shock
when I wake up and
anger is sitting on my chest
His eyes and her voice
Smooth and heavy
Smells like emptiness and
tastes like sulfur

No matter that I've
Gained all I lost
Lost all I gained
Anger just sits there
It doesn't regret

I either stare it down
shout it away
stomp it out
or convince it
it makes no sense
Anyway
it just can't stay

Joy can't stay either
when I wake up and
joy is swirling in my body
I know it will leave and
I know nothing
Smells like wishes and
tastes like melted butter

Don't love too much
need too much
believe or trust too much
Give the dazzle camouflage
I am an altered beast

Preservation

He is moving on
leaving this place
Not like a sad country song
Or some drunken low class tale
of suitcases in the night
and slammed doors

He is going
Setting sail away
Like a healing wound
Or the slow growing of sapling
to shady tree and
home for hammock

I will let him
Because on my scales
All of this love I hold
and all of the love he holds
can't outweigh the present pain
and problematic pathos

I will let him

Birds

Beautiful ruby-breasted bird
At my window every day
you nested in my heart
and opened me like the sun opens
the earth at dawn

What kind of bird are you?
An odd one
You cocked your head
and listened - sang and preened
I told you my secrets - you joined them

And I loved you
In thirteen different ways

Hummingbird jeweled and eager
At my window every day
You are nervous heart
in frightened chest
Racing and evasive flight

Is there anything I know?
You lap up the sweetness
in the center and preen
I sing for you but you won't land

And I loved you
In thirteen different ways

Inky beady shifty crow
At my window now and then
Pecking at the shiny bits
I laid out in a row
For you alone

What do I know?
You will fly and not look back
The burning best of me
stuck firmly in your talons

And I loved you
In thirteen different ways

Bitter, laughing mockingbird
Of you I get a fleeting glimpse
It comes with shame
Sorrow sword fighting with anger
leaving me misunderstood

Is there anything I know?
You made a mockery of all I revealed
Pecked away the gentle bits
I needed tended

And I loved you
In thirteen different ways

Vulture, buzzard, bird-of-prey
Never to be seen again
Now that you've consumed it all
We cannot use our tongues
Cannot stumble out

But this I know

I loved you
In thirteen different ways

Floating Heart

They say tears make the heart lighter
If this were true
This heart would float alar
And land in your lap

Words of love without fear are admired
For their strength
As long as they are returned
By the intended

Otherwise the world mocks them as madness
Silly, foolish
Unrealistic and immature
Not like me

I can breathe without that

Blank

You did this
He said
Rattling pill bottles, frozen time and place,
literally figurative bullets to the brain

My mouth formed an O
that telescoped inside
And cleared a spot I thought I knew
of everything I recognize,

Think hard
He said
Because I need and love that which killed me
Resurrected me and killed me again

But how?
Thinking should be glass
Reflective, logic, calm
Measured and prepared

All my thoughts
Sunburst hotly from the center
And just can't seem to connect
To anything I recognize.

Stumbling over

Oh, my rendered heart
Stop aching with such a ticking
constant voice of your own
I have to live now

People rely on me
Besides, if it changed
it never was, after all

I keep tripping on all of these
esoteric compartments
I never should have opened
Fuck if I can close them now

Take away the arena, fill the
basement with cement, then you can forget
(You are so smart, I swear)
You can forget what was and pretend it was not

Shaving it all away in layers
Until circuits and signs and psyche
and faith are useless and rattling
The cosmos and all of its
dreams
books
kismet
happenstance
synchronicity
Can kiss my altered ass

Liquid

Why do you scrape your soul
and leave the shiny piles of
shavings everywhere?
Why do you sleep so close to
the poison?

Why do I wring this flesh?
Is it bad to wish a whole year of this life
never happened?
To have the pride to say
"You did not earn this"?

The preface to this epilogue was wrong
Those words were blue green sea glass
Liquefying in my hands
into bottomless pools of beauty
No shivers...I felt so safe
diving in with eyes closed
But this end?

This end makes me land on
craggy rocks of shame
Puts shadows in placed they
should not be.

Grit

Sometimes the slap comes before the sound,
But the sound comes after the realization…
…something is coming.

I try to stand amid the rocks I know are there,
Won't slip because there's too much on my shoulders,
You are spread like foam on the shoreline.
But I can't catch you…
…you slip right through my fingers.

I know my words can be full of grit,
Like sucking the ocean through your teeth…
…but the crunch feels good.

You want to believe you could do nothing wrong.
Can't you see? We all do something wrong sometimes.
Like leaving our book in the desert sun.
The page yellows to dust…
…which slips right through our fingers.

The aftermath of the big parade is sad,
Our ties are forgotten streamers underfoot…
…melt into the ground.

I can't stop the tide…
…the end…
…the change…
…the loss.
I can't prop myself up on your skeleton.
So I'll drown my indifference in beef jerky and stale cherry turnovers.

Hollow

This hollow once was filled with good things
Joy of ignorance...faith in hearts and meaning
It is just...well...hollow now

If time can fix it all, well
she simply
shuffles around too slowly
and doesn't really fix anyway
just deadens

There are the bits that cannot dull away
The ones each pile of human wreckage carries concealed
to visit secretly
Made worse, it seems, by knowing your poignant page
is just a footnote in some books

To manufacture nonchalance is a tough trade
For those unskilled in the art
like me
They say learn from your mistakes
But I do not want this lesson

Cosmos
When you get a chance
Cut me some slack

Haiku 2

You did not have love
To end it all the right way
Pain, tears and regret

Platitude

I can see you nod your head
with the patient piety you have
cultivated
that makes me want to spit

I can hear you say
"Look at how creative all this pain has made you!"
"Think of what we had, not what we lost!"
and all manner of practiced platitude you employ
so life is good and you have all you need

I can see you nod your head
You think your careful, paranoid epilogue
laden with judgement
should be okay for me too

As if I wouldn't trade every
word to get my faith back?

At all of your patient piety and
practiced paranoid platitude
I hurl the only words that seemed
to get your attention

Fuck you

Corporeal

The bones of winter
Yellow with despair
I fleshed them out with moss of spring
Coaxed heartbeat out of seedlings
Struggling through the crust of frost

My sun, my moon, my earth
Cracked open into summer with moistened lips
Escaped sighs and kaleidoscope skin
Bare and bold and sugar
Full of fearless faith and notably feathered fantasy

No shields when autumn came down
Quizzical and drafty
No repair for crumbling brown lace of drying leaves
Dusty in my hands
Sentinels at the gates
That fragile voice that sent me over cliffs
and around shadowed corners
Set up stones instead of breezeways

So I was not prepared when winter came again
While some spoke of baby animals in the clouds
and brand new birth
I mashed meat into my face and wondered alone

I did not notice spring this time around
Summer full of barbs and dated land mines
Autumn is just a fall

Bizarre little fantasy

I have developed a fairly disturbing addiction to Dunkin' Donuts Iced Caramel Lattes...no whipped cream, no extra sugar...nice and large. Evidence of the battle can be found in the door of my car...shrapnel of straw paper, napkins and receipts. I don't like DD coffee...but those lattes. Yum.

I find myself fantasizing about working there. About the predictable motions of making coffee, icing the donuts...clear and easy barometers of success. Smiling at customers...doling out the dozens. This is actually something I've sat and thought about at length.

That good kind of tired that comes from standing all day. Physical ache. I dream my body would be tired...but my mind clear. I would spend the rest of my time reading and learning...since there would likely be more room in this head for what I wanted to put in there.

Silly, I know.

Destruction

So many things
Considered beautiful to the senses
Are so destructive

Ocean
Butter
Lightning
Space
Whiskey
God
Rain

The worst of these is love.

A moment

If the very notion
makes you cry,
If just the thought without a dab of reality,
stops your heart,
makes your head roll,
your breath halt,
brings down dizzy drapes of the surreal.
What do you do?

Do you say what hasn't been said?
Repeat what hasn't been heard?
Hold it all in?
Live like the splayed out vibrant orange of a tiger lily?
Or like the shriveled white of a morning glory at dusk?

What do you do?

Burning Tongue

this burning tongue
makes me think of you
spiced and tingling
taste-buds bubbling
slipping into sweetness

then just gone

Mary

She talks to angels
And she does not shake with fear
She smiles like the Mona Lisa
Knowing they would pick her

She is not paralyzed
By doubt or hidden things
She speaks of preparation and unity
Knowing things without ecstasy

She is unwavering
Her mind between her soul and spirit
She is purity and sin; wisdom and ignorance
Knowing she is ungendered in the truth

Rainbow

Joy and sorrow; bloom and dust
Like chosen cousins
Tight as colors in a rainbow
Mixing into murky brown at the end

I want my light
to go out quickly
No lingering unaware amid beeps and moist faces
For me

G.R.

When he left
Cold water shock
Snail stalk sorrow
Busy with tasks and numbness
Salt at the door
Buckshot with anger for the castrating martyr unaware
No air when I walked into the still, almost padded room
Holding what was left
"He had that smile on when he got here,"
said the sculptor

When she goes
What then?
Listen to the echoed drips of fear and sorrow
Filling this tin vessel
What then?

Haiku 1

The rain smells like soil
I wonder why the edge is
Gone from everything

The Wait

Waiting for the saddest moment
The worst of the worst
So all of this I hold inside
Can tumble out of the breach in my chest
Paint the walls and holler at the moon
Squeeze out like all soft creatures of the rain
With ooze and thud
And nothing to mistake for delicate

To wail at walls and clasp my hands
Around my skull
as if to keep it from shattering
For tears to flow like candy drops on a conveyor belt
Constant; coming
No matter now many you stuff in your shirt

To blather and drool
Third eye throb
Brow like blocked highway lanes
Limbs like a mountain climber's rope
All sorts of variations on tension and slack

To live all of this
Without a soul saying "What's wrong?"
Because they'll think,
They know.

Here it is.

I set this blog up ages ago, yet the purpose for it changed so many times I never seemed to get started.
It was originally intended as a companion to a podcast, which remains on the back burner and not forgotten.
I thought I might start using it to get up on soapboxes of various sizes and shapes to spout off my opinion on all of the flotsam and jetsam that is the news. Oil spill, Arizona, "financial reform", "healthcare reform"...there's been plenty in just the past month or so to fill pages and pages with what I "think." But aren't there enough people carefully wording opinions on all of this...waiting for all of the concurring opinions to praise them on their insight and sexy turn of phrase? I might have things to say...brilliant things, even...but there are others saying the same in slightly different words. So, while I might feel the need to spout off on some topic on here now and then, I won't be using this space for that alone.
I don't expect many people to be reading this...just a few I invite to stop by, I suppose. I decided the space does not need a definition.

The past year and change has been very altering for me. Unfortunately, not all in a positive way. I'll even say not in much of a positive way at all. Such is the risk one takes when one tries to live without filter. I've been known for saying through the years that I would not allow life and its miserable challenges to change me. I would not be beaten down! My naive, open heart would stay as it was until the day I was old and eccentric...with long hair, odd collections, far too many books and a proclivity for things that just aren't "age appropriate." Well, my friends, life has been working me harder than an insurgent at Abu Ghraib. I am hanging onto those filaments of naivete...but just barely.
Boo-freakin-hoo, ay? Life is a tangle for most of us, sure. I'm not talking about the everyday crap. Economy, job stuff, child rearin', garden variety pain and traffic, the woes of friends...I'm still handling most of that with aplomb. The addition of certain personally cataclysmic events...direct hits to my previously upheld definition of myself...well...THAT is what has made for the rough go.

If you are reading this, chances are you know me pretty well. You know I tend to not only speak...but write and write and write in an effort to sort out, soothe and heal. As of late, I have been writing poetry again. By no means am I calling myself a poet. Hardly. While I'm fairly fond of some things I have written, I know most are simply words struggling out of me as representative of what battles inside. It's been that way for me always. I'm just jotting them down now. But writing down a turn of phrase or a couplet or two a poet does not make. Not at all.

So this space will be a repository for most of it. Since most of the random notebooks and slips of paper are easy to lose and this spot stays put. Keeps me from losing everything in the random fires, if you get my meaning.

I do have plans to try to start up a local poetry group. Make some strangers friends and give them all a forum in which to dump out their words.

Caveat emptor...chances are, I'll be unable to stay off the soapbox at some point. Might post a picture. A random thought. As always, my beloveds, your comments are welcome...encouraged, even.