"My mistress' eyes are nothing…"
She wrapped me in her quilted smile
then torched the salty fabric of us,
tear stained and aching.
She knees cruel in the balls.
And I love her that way just the same.
She hangs me up to dry,
then cuts me down for air.
The breathing windows of us,
pulsating walls setting chairs rocking,
us inside, lulled in four-arm sleep.
That poet last night set spin wheeling nouns and verb sighs.
Just one.
His verses coursing by pleasurably permeable, sealed lids,
Just zero.
Shuttering a head hollowed of word, notion or expectation.
Just one.
Emptied, spaciously awaiting fellow travelers’ souvenirs.
Just zero.
“Hear with eyes closed and you’ll see,” you once told me.
Just one.
Fluff-sniff uttered tears, sentimental notes on napkins, he
Just zero.
Etched lines pressed hard, full hearted and tritely delivered.
Just one.
But none, no magical words soothe-slid my ear’s tongue.
Just zero.
Like a sketched sea on an amber lit canvas of indigo waves
Just one.
You once cyber brushed in digital smears, dot and stroke,
Just zero.
In feathered illusion, simulations of depth, heat and space,
Just one.
But shallow and frail–less breath, less truth, less warmth–
Just zero.
Your screen nearly lifted me, lying flat across atoms and time:
Just one.
No light, no touch, no sight, no rhyme, no texture, no heights
Just zero.
The sky and sea run parallel, or so it seems. Sky
Contiguous, at least, as free attachment,
committed only to movement and time.
While the sea chuckles in currents
as the day and nighttime shifts
clasp her–as does the sky–
she buoys who lap her up
or swallows them down,
floating or drowning,
life-giving or taking;
Yet he hovers his
companion there–
free-fall suspended–
in shallow-air support.
She who risks his domain
will surely succumb, sink below
surface silhouettes traveling rippled
rivulet toe tips, riding her once-in-a-lifetime. Sea
September 23, 2016
She smiled. Big, rangy, opened mouth, showing teeth in disarray, pebbly whites leaning this way and that. She might have passed on the 6 years of braces and a jaw breaking operation to fix her over bite had she known.
It’s been weeks, maybe months since I’ve seen one. Stoic, plaster of Paris’d grimace with etched, rheumy eyes of wandering distant dimensions cast her face in alabaster stillness most days. But this one came with direct eye contact–so rare these days–followed by an electrocution of recognition, and light, light, oh heavenly light in her eyes.
She was happy to see me. I said, “I love you,” and with doughy mouth, corners tucked upright into flaccid folds as if hung on clothesline wooden clips to her cheekbones, she garbled a few syllables in reply. And then she made a silly face, rolled her eyes, wobbled her head side to side, like a drunken clown, and muttered a mocking kind of bubbubbub with her deliberately deep voice. Sarcastic self-deprecation, her specialty. As if to say, what the fuck can I utter with this face, with this chaotic, misfiring, brittle brain disconnected from its humanity?
“I miss you, Mom.” I didn’t want her to see the ache. So I smiled even larger. If I could make her know. If I could just…
6 seconds and it was over. We lost ourselves once more to our distant galaxies, each on either side of the black hole.
Black hole: pixabay.com
Dear John:
You’ve told me a man must have everything.
He must have her love and affection, trust
and cares, woes and fantasies, body and belief.
He must contain and compel her dreams, speak
her mind with her, beside her and be her too.
He must have her body, entirely his own, as she
equally partakes of his, fully accessible any time.
He must give her solace and she his support.
They must build things and break things down,
together, working as a team, united as one.
There must be abundant love everlasting, you say,
and undying even beyond death and delivery.
John, you’ve claimed possession of her opinions,
her bodily secretions, and her style of clothing.
You’ve demanded her attention and hands, her
movements during the day and night, her arms
ever clasping yours, enveloping you enveloping her…
Dear John, my dearest of all, love can’t be swapped
and traded, quantified and qualified, bought and sold.
Love is no cure, can’t fill the gaps, cracks or ailments,
not those inherent or fostered in the care of those who
thought love was power and hurt and discipline and
control, John, mere control that fear spills through you.
Love is not for keeps, never on sale, bundled or peddled.
Especially, love is not had but kindled, like wood fires
warmth and sustenance, dazzling and mysterious, in
properties known and magical too. Love has no rules.
John, let me, if you will, teach you all I know about love.
Love–
First Cut–
Perhaps my father was the first,
with his absence,
except for the rare storms from his daytime slumber
to terrorize us into quiet so he could sleep.
I once got caught in the cross fire of his flying hands.
I was not yet 3.
My older sisters squealed and screamed him awake.
But I was too naive to run.
Before that, he was the myth my mother made us believe
about fatherhood and tender love.
First Cut II–
Another one I summons from memory caves
was the gorgeous boy
with the ass long shiny silk brown hair
and tan flawless skin sunk into Italian brown eyes.
I was 13 and he 15.
He paid me attention, walked with me at night
on a quiet moon-lit road named Candlewood as we
murmured our intentions, our future married selves
–or I did.
I couldn’t believe he was interested in me, a brainy
average-looking girl with the wrong kind of hair that refused
to hang long and straight from a middle combed part.
And a week after that walk under the old gibbous moon,
when I told him I wanted to marry a bodily lover,
he failed to appear, non-responsive, ghosted–
and I cried the cliché with a painful heart, torn
and scorned, never to be stabbed the same again,
my pillows my week-long companions in sob-town.
First Cuts–
Though others made Caesar of my heart, dagger
hurlers and stabbers, I remember them vaguely.
Not like the first cuts, the baptismal soul’s sarcophagus.
To cup a hand to an upturned ear
To hear what all there is to hear
Echo down the hall and up the stair
And keep my mind from turning fear.
To hear what all there is to hear
And keep my mind from turning fear
I’ll muster up ol’ brave good cheer
And fight the crowd’s scowly sneer.
To keep my mind from turning fear
And fight the crowd’s scowly sneers
I’ll hold my loves to me ever nearer
And never let them harm my dears.
I’ll fight the crowd’s awful sneers
And never let them harm my dears
Lest their hateful lies most insincere
Sway the surging tide to lesser cares.
I’ll never let them harm my dears
Nor sway the tide to lesser cares
Like hate and names no one dares.
Framing targets in trigger hairs
Sway no tide to lesser cares!
Frame no targets in trigger hairs!
Come clean in consciences bared
For hate’s glare dies in love shared.
August 21, 2016
Late summer cleaning: Decluttering my room brings me to well-traveled roads. Everything I touch feels or smells like time: last week, month, year or decade. My room aggregates time.
But not just this room. I’ve inhabited rooms all my life, fortunate as I am to have had roofs over my head. Only by choice have I slept outside a room–from camping under the stars, backpacking across the country or passed out drunk on a stranger’s couch.
My first room–one of my own–had tan shorn short carpet covered in down feathers slowly de-fluffed from my down comforter through small growing holes. I shared an apartment with my older sister after I left the home I shared with my husband for nearly 9 years. We were on hiatus. Six years of separation. And this room was the first I called my own, having shared all my other rooms from birth to age 29.
Though the circumstances of my landing in this room in an apartment complex settled below the hump of a freeway on ramp dampened the excitement of this first time experience, still I marveled at the possibilities: stamp my own identify into the fabric. Finally, I could fill a space with me, pieces of me in art, furnishings, bed sheets and comforters, knick knacks–all my choices.
As it turned out, however, I’d only half live in that space and the only addition to the bland, bare tan room, bed and dresser I unloaded moving in was the escaped goose down feather floor covering. Between obsessive work hours and mad dash dating, I hardly spent time in that room I slept in for two years before I bought a house, where I lived for another three or four years before moving back into my marital home, where now, 21 years later, I have my own room–sort of, mostly–to clean.
My father’s heart fell victim to heredity…
Here you will find the rest of poem 9 of the poetry marathon.
Heart of Hearts
Posted on August 14, 2016 12:02am EST by pgerber
My father’s heart fell victim to heredity four years ago.
The surgeon placed a stent in his aortic valve to brace
the walls and keep the blood flowing.
I imagine the stent shaped like a bridge to strings,
like the one that bolsters the cello
in the corner of my room collecting dust.
But even before that, he couldn’t pass the physical
to join the Korean War–his heart murmured
something the doctors did not like.
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My father’s father died of a heart attack, or
maybe complications of diabetes that betrayed his heart.
He was a musician and a piano tuner,
who sometimes imposed a cello lesson on me,
firmly pressing my fingers to the finger board
nearly 45 years ago on that corner resting cello.
All of his 8 sons played musical instruments.
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The 21 year old I work with at the sweet shop,
whose name may be Rob or Mike or John,
is someone I would say has a heart of gold,
but for his laziness, though still an amiable sort.
He has a pair of friends, twin brothers, who
come to pick him up from work and take him home.
One told me that Rob-Mike-John had five heart attacks
when he was only a sophomore in high school.
His doctor said he was lucky to be alive.
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My mother’s heart is strong, always has been.
Her mind and body are ravaged by demented
disease, forgetting to allow her to live, but her
heart beats resoundingly under her ribs, her doctor says.
And though the cuffs don’t hurt her any more,
too little flesh on her arms, her blood pressure rocks.
Sans word, thought or flesh, she is pure pulsing heart now.
We’re in the car. I muse out loud, “I want to carry into the world the kindness and caring I feel when I do yoga or when I write about the garden I peek at sometimes through the fence separating our yard from the neighbor’s or when I’m baking apricot and garlic spread into baguette then topping it with sun dried tomatoes that have soaked in Greek olive oil a good long while, for our dinner guests.”
The one in the front seat is silent, but the wise ass in the back seat, snarkily asks in disbelief, “You?” Then she shakes her head slowly and says, “Nah.” They both laugh.
I laugh. She’s a quick witted funny kid. But as we drive a way into the silence, a momentary pause in conversation, each with our thoughts, I frown inside.
I meant it. The kindness does not extend far beyond the mat. I don’t want to manufacture it for myself by motion and feel-good-pat-on-the-back exercises and readings. I want to exercise it, stress test it in the throes of messy, even horrible existence, in the battles on the streets, on the road, in the supermarket, and on social media.
This election circus distracts me (a Trump funk), foments mental terror and pulsing anger that requires the quelling by kindness, everyone’s. But mine is especially important in my world, to the people I touch. Hiding inside words, playing nice with language won’t do. I won’t be jailed by the surrounding toxic vitriol. I vow to melt it, laser it with the heat of my passionate dispassion.
Love. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love…
In the gaze of the other 