Maybe for Nancy and Tom

We are selling the couch today

to some couple –Nancy and Tom.

Nancy and Tom were definitive;

Exact in what exactly they were looking for

Eager, precisely, for a tan and pleather couch. In fact,

They’ve got to have it today, “As soon as possible,” they said.

My response was delight, “No problem!” I said, wanting

to rid myself of the tan and pleather object.

How I hate its obtrusive shape and abhorrent texture.

If only they knew-

How we fought over who was responsible

For the ugly couch.

The ugly couch upon which we made love,

Our bare skin chilled against the cool plastic-like fabric.

Perhaps Nancy and Tom will experience the same.

-Being pressed between the confutation of warm, slapping flesh

And the cold stiff arms of

Our couch.

When the couch is gone- it will be empty.

The space, the place, we once called home.

The space, the place, we must then scour,

And clean until it is bone dry,

Absolve it of all that was

Left

In the wreckage.

We must erase any link to

A time when nothing was linked,

Couldn’t be, wouldn’t be

Shouldn’t have

Been always.

But maybe for Nancy and Tom.

TO Joe

"I’ve got to fold because these hands are just too shaky to hold,

Hunger hurts, but starving works when it costs too much to love..."

‘you’re crazy’ he says with a flick of spit and a point to his head. ‘you’re crazy’ I thought, my stomach like lead. I want, I dream, I hope, I try and I have a bad day..there’s only so much to do and not to do…barreling through eggshells like it will make…like I will make it…still…but instead I’m stiff with mucus, covered in slivers cut by shells that I broke. If only I wouldn’t stomp…if only I would tiptoe

over your ego, wedging myself between your insecurity and the scrutiny of an eye…unforgiving, ready to leap at the culprit, to notice the invasion into …? Explanation. I know not…the limits of who it is and was that you want me to be, that you expect me to be, could I be any more? Could I survive anymore, could I not love you anymore? Damned if I do and damned if I don’t –I guess you feel the same way…I think. I think.

If you loved me…why? Why, then this? Why am I the one choking down my own ribcage, turning inside out?

Undertow

You say for you there will be no between—

Between the two of us.

Click your heels, raise your voice, bitter the scene;

Count the stars, number our days, fluff and preen.

But, do not, my friend, fly the cusp.

Do not invade the sanctity behind

Sullen instigation.

Instead, let us be, as is; think to find

Resolve shucking pebbles within our minds;

An inebriation.

In pulling thread, gray, through the head, to know

Of once we were and are—

Needles gouging, mending; gapped flesh to sew;

Broken scars in the currents, we do tow.

How we have come so far.

In between, the in-between is solace

To break awaiting falls.

Yet, we slip beneath the storm with distress,

Masking truth with irony to be less

Than was meant; safe in a deep lull.

Little Dreams

Child Guinivere cries in her sleeping,

Undulating beneath the damp thick of sweat.

Her chest quavers in fear of dreams dark.

Hidden below her pillow, silvery sharks slash babies to tears.

Somewhere, in a place dry,

Dragons do scorch and rear to save.

Burgeoning, inaccessible truths.

False calamity awaits her slumber,

Mother goose, to mollify, awaits,

Spinning the spun across the wreck of youthful aware.

Her hands, in shade of pink, caress to comfort the fear.

Web of black sky broken in clouds

quick to pace,

Fish-eye hook of a moon milking the mask of bleak.

Inside the hearts and minds of children,

is chance of requite,

Fervent love bedded beneath their simple hopes.

Keen of the “it”, too keen for it

Swimming a little harder now.

Then, from the folds of sheet, a child awakes with aged eyes.

Walk Poem

It’s 9:30 in the morning, and either their early or I’m late.

Heavy high in hue of hate

of remnants of an early rising state.

Cherry blossoms blooming, pink- pale

-Peace. Solemn in stride stale sobriety. Eight weeks clean, now.

Guinivere dreamed her way into a bed of water.

I found her treading the pillows, the mattress

Screaming of a shark, pink-pale.

With human arms. Reaper reaching to right wrongs

I have done.

Wake child. Trauma resides, so we swim the bed

Butchering sharks until the waves are red

And the waters safe.

The day before

yesterday we picked up smooth shells from the shore

Of a Long Island beach beneath a blue-black sky.

We grinded sand in our teeth, as the wind whipped

Salt gritty strands of hair in our eyes.

We talked of sharks, then, and dolphins.

Guinivere dreamed of sharks.

I went to a meeting last night.

Hippies high on life on the hard flat floor. No carpet,

Just gangsters and businessmen, bawlers and shot-callers

Upright in their aluminum chairs. And yet,

There was myself, young mama

Slouched in pretty pink-pale.

Addiction, they said, an infantile tendency

To clumsily cling to a catastrophic comfort.

The speaker clung to the vertical brass of the lamp

-post. Posing to illustrate defeat due to dependence.

I nod. The hippies twirl dreadlocks into the ceiling

As businessmen tap the faces of their gold watches

Late for dinner with the wife.

Wish I had a wife to wake me in the morning.

Bricks

I stand against the current

of vertical laid brick,

red hard beneath my

leathered feet.

The sun against my back

warmth pressing into my

spine. I rest in its

arms, swaying

only when the current

of brick and breeze

buckle me to my knees.

Ever moving in this stand still,

this perpetually stationary stance,

bracing me, I bracing,

eyes drooping, black beneath

bottom lashes, purple.

“You look so tired,” they say.

“It’s the brick,” I say,

“its rising from the morter to

pound me in the face

with reality, the reality of living in a world

of flying bricks”. “What?”

Bowing my stance.

Lean into the sun,

Brace yourself my dear.

Sun,

hold me steady,

Wrap your fiery fingers around

my shoulders;

tender my wounds if only

for a second.