Category: literary

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Post Matris Vitae

 

 
And I thought to myself, “Where shall we bury her?”

Startled by the sheer absence of an idea, I winced.
Those who never come to see her haven’t a notion

or they would have asked at Thanksgiving dinner.
We buried her so long ago somehow yet there it is,

the question of her final resting place looming large.
A few weeks will bring another birthday celebration

that she passes unaware of her previous 77 years.
And she, stuffed in a back room while we all feasted,

the family she grew and fostered, living as if we know.
Did anyone see her in the shadows of her own wake?

Will anyone mourn the body’s cease post matris vitae?

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Capital Mist

  

 

Strafing the boulevard, the store lit signs obscenely shout their names

as if no one could hear them, remember their wares and goods, so well,

I can tell which aisle to find band aids for this wound that refuses to heal

scabbed and picked and bled and smoothed and scabbed over and over

or salve for the rims of my heels dried and cracked in winter’s brutal beat.
 

Restaurants, all sizes, shapes and price ranges scaling a rainbow’s fare

for appetites unending, cresting at habitual hunger hours’ gurgling songs.

How a child longs for happiness in a meal and a toy, romping a petri dish

soaked in saliva and snot and piss and crap laced red plastic pinged balls

or cushioned blows to bodies flung down chutes and ladders’ padded iron.
 

CVS Pharmacy and McDonalds and Chase bank and Pizza Hut/Taco Bell,

the art of commerce accompanies the blank of night the wreckage left me

twisted in elbowed chin to slump, knee over knee gaze reflected glass cut

through another plane of recognition, climate shift, and chance transformer

where a mind observes facts like neon signs wailing wisdom’s mist, capital.

 

credit: mattperfectblog.blogspot.com

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A Stranger Shook my Hand

image

From the sky, like rain on a sunny day,

blazing like arson, a stranger walked in,

shook my hand and asked how I fared.

His hand melted goo through my fingers.

Jumped back in warped skill, he took me,

fled with my expression still open wide,

shut tight in frightened delighted airspace.

And we toured the streaming veins of time,

spinning til the G’s popped open our eyes.

By then his smile lingered Cheshire drawn

while the faint stain painted a rose dying

in my hand’s palm he clasped as life lines.

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Knock Knock

  
Knock, knock, knocking

They constantly want inside

takers disguised as networkers

giving me something I don’t need

just so they can. I don’t want them.

I crave holing, gathering up my wits

acute, incisive, slipping out my ears.

Who can write with so much chatter?

so much irrelevant noise, never ending

polluting the pristine powder of ideations

pure and unsullied, untouched and virginal?

There, freshness whisks, tucked away, shiny

bright and ready to reflect the sun of its making.

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In Gratitude…#Nanowrimo completed: 23 days, a novel

  
Seems befitting that on this weekend of gratitude, I conclude this huge though not impossible endeavor with the following:

While reintegrating to my life by inches, loving the smallest favors first like the grip of a long handled toothbrush or the pleasure of a private shit and shower, my own bed with more than two inches of mattress and a box spring in the quiet of my home, ragged as it was and is, snuggled inside the lefthand loop of a cul de sac; then appreciating bigger things like the love of a family that has been loving me–hard–more than I let myself feel, all this time. 

My family, blood and adopted, came through for me in a way that shocked me, even though it could not have been more predictable. They wrote, visited, and watched; they stood by and pitched in. They witnessed helplessly as I crumbled and paid enormous sums to secure my freedom, cried for me in my grief but did not pity me nor make themselves the heroes; they took care of me. 

JM stepped up for me and suffered like the brave and strong he never knew he was, taking up the mantle where I had dropped it. He came through for all of us, doing whatever he had to, and he proved to himself he was strong, something he needed to know but couldn’t since he had never needed to before. That was my job–ensuring that no one needed to be strong. I coddled them as organizer, unifier  and fixer. Now they took up the reins and showed themselves worthy of the task. And I received.

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The Cage of Sanctioned Poverty

 

 
What they and the entire jail system missed or ignored, though, is the futility of punitive measures. So many of these women young and old had much worse lives outside of jail. They would easily trade the abuse–constant shouting, cursing, shoving, terrorizing and haranguing–for the safety and regularity of meals and meds in jail. All of their efforts to harass, abuse, demean and dehumanize had already been done on the streets by drug addled family, friends and lovers, or poverty, pimps and official and unofficial authorities on the streets. They were impervious to the abuse. The only ones who suffered the doled out intended intimidation were the rarer folks like me who somehow found themselves swept up in a hurricane of their own misstepped making, befuddled and shocked. The rest could care less. Jail was temporary and worse awaited them on the outside.
 

Credit: http://www.salon.com

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Dualities not Duels

 
 

“Again, you know I don’t judge; I respect your relationship. I’m never here to tear you or J down. Who am I to do more than put myself in your place–even as I am merely me–and wonder? That’s all. I imagine your life in my body and mind. It does not work that way, but I cannot help but do it. You know I love you.”

“I do.” ((hugs))

“Drink up. I have to go back to work.”

While driving back to work, my thoughts cycle. 

“The shape of our relationships doesn’t differ much–this duality that appears like incompatability to those on the outside.”

You and I, you see, are so different, from such different worlds, you the straight and me the curvy, you the narrow and me the expansive. You like yours and I prefer mine. You know you’re right and I constantly doubt. To you, absolutes are real. To me, most everything is relative to time, place, and circumstance. You see global, while I see local, though sometimes we switch sides, me going long term and you going short. In the ven diagram, we intersect at the sliver overlap of our two circles. We meet in a horizontal world without borders, boxed and invisible, dimmed before each other, not in full light. Perhaps we must, or see the impossibility of us and kill the thrill. And yet, that divide, that delusion of polarity, opposition and contrariness keeps us interested, coming back for more. N’est ce pas?



 

credit: http://www.intermissionbristol.co.uk

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Improbabilities

  
I don’t believe everything happens for a reason. I subscribe to chaos. I believe in the randomness of the universe as movement, collision, coincidence and correspondence. I believe in an ontology of chance. Cause-and-effect is real, but we humans are not always accurate tracers of chains. We are a lazy species, thus the teleology of throwing-up-our-arms-at-space with a surrendering shake of the head and declaring that the proof of the universe’s supporting life lies in our being here–the best science has to offer after unsuccessfully tracing the mathematical and natural laws to their inevitable ends in hopes of figuring out everything, just everything. We theorize origins and evolutions. We interpret from variables of experience, anatomy, observation and subjectivity. I do not trust absolutes. I believe in intention and will, though not necessarily in intended results. Thus speaks the rational mind of me.

The smoke and whispers, the mystery of which intuition is born, lean into those uninformed leaps of faith inside an unthinking gut and take me in another direction: a life unfolds according to its makeup, an already-has composition that merely needs room to spread out and manifest. Choices come from inherent brain patterns in conjunction with pathways generated in reaction to lived experience. This orchestrated tapestry of evolving human is the carpet unrolling from birth to death, a definitive starting and ending point that always ever was because of whom I was born, when and where. In that way, choices logical and whimsical alike, are prefigured, patterns predetermined even in their ensuing alterations and modifications. A determinism I am not comfortable with somehow associates the mystery of the inexplicable to me–my fuzzy teleology.

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Adrift

  
I call him a drifter, 

but who remains static?

No thought ever nailed itself

down, tacked to airless walls.

No body stops unceasingly,

all that pumping and throbbing,

ever moving cogs and wheels

the sentient and incognizant alike.

Even in death and decay, there

movement devolves-transforming.

Stillness breathes a steady notion

but no such evidence exists.

Ever in motion, roving nomads,

we, the universe compels it.

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And the Wall Came Crumbling Down

 

 
The wall shook, rock crumbles beginning to fall even as the creature living underneath and behind it began slowly emerging, escaping the barrier. The image of my own making would take years to shatter.
 

credit:  villagevoice.com

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