Funambulism

 (c) 2002

I am, by nature, high strung
but this time the rope is stretched
above an urban chasm and I am too dizzy
to deal with the rotation or to exert torque.
But oh. I am dressed so pretty
in pale pink tights and a pinker tutu.
I believe all the eyes on me will hold me up.
While I go aerial and pirouette
I wonder if you are thinking about
just how pretty I am
or would you prefer I break my neck?

Postcard: Enough

 (c) 2015

I’ve finally begun throwing them away;
the grade school report card where Teacher
gave me a failing grade and commented
that I was working to the best of my ability.
The recommendation letter
that colored me so poorly it was useless.
The one bad performance evaluation I kept
as though it were the only true assessment.
And the diaries stretching back to junior high.
What I’m looking for is no longer there.
Whatever makes me sad now is not about that child.
She could never be as bright, as beautiful,
as gifted as I would like her to be.
There is no changing her now. She was all she could be.
I’m sure she was enough.  

Folie a Deux

 (c) 2016

When we met we reached for love
but found instead a folie á deux.
I said, “Love is painful” so you hurt me. 
I said, “Daddy never saw the real me.” 
You tore up the poems I’d given you
without reading them. You said,
“You’re fat.” I ate more ice cream. 
You said, “Mothers are cruel.”
I hit your knees with an iron pipe.
You said, “Life is lonely.” I left.
I found it all much too gratifying
and when I ran into you years later
you said you missed it too.

The Dream You Always Wanted

 (c) 2016

In this dream everyone is happy.
Everyone finds their way home, fully clothed.
The key fits the lock, the locker isn’t bare.
No tsunami crashes covering the street
in car parts, asphalt and wave.
The earthquake has gone still.
The most beautiful woman in the world
is still beautiful and holds her hand out to you.
In this dream all the puzzles are solved.
Metaphors are understood; truly a joy to discover.
This is the dream you always wanted;
the dream you were afraid to dream.

Roles

 (c) 12/2020

I should have given up playing the ingenue decades ago
but none of the other roles really fit either.
The harpy comes close because, when poorly directed
a cataclysmic rage will pour out of me
until someone is devoured dark and swift.
On occasion, I shave off my hair
and try to swagger like rough trade.
I am unable to play it with any conviction.
I am not as gifted as I would like to be
with  pretend posture, attitude, or phrasing
though I had near success once with mother.
And he was young, because they are all young;
Eternals for whom time runs out
just when we thought it was unlimited.
The first time I saw him I thought, Oh, there he is.
My split-off animus. My dream figure walking the world.
I saw him enveloped in halos and I admit
more of what I wanted than was there.
It could be I have a faulty aperture.
The mechanism flawed; a loose screw sprung years ago.
Halos and half-gods, with light not so much emanating
as thinning at outer edges.
I never really learned how to behave around a human,
neither how to hold nor how to be held.  

Beauty

 (C) 1998

It is Summer and the lilac bush is already brown,
its heady purple gone until Spring.
Beauty lasts but a season
unless I have simply not learned to recognize it
unless it is rabid, bursting, young.
I would say that the tulip opening is lovelier than the tulip decay.
That the red cherry outranks the yellow. The apple above the leaf.
All my life a pursuit of beauty and beauty limited
to a moment of ripeness.
 
Humans are born with an innate ability to separate
the immediate beauty  by their symmetrical face
from the disproportioned average. Still,
I hear there are humans who develop beyond baby-teeth,
beyond narcissism and bed-wetting,
beyond shallow skin-deep love, and yes,
I have observed the homely, the helpless, hapless holding hands
leaning inward in synchronicity, mesmerized beyond the science of it all.
I want that, too.

After

(c) 2013

We touch and are infinite.
And the moment after
end tables darken from an expansive flesh
to mahogany and coalesce. Walls
like madly growing vines shoot
up from the floor.
As Space reassembles solid and rigid
we notice chill from the window,
snow fall, the graying shoulders of the day.
My back is cold. Time no longer timeless.
Oh, how fortunate, those gods.
Within your arms,
a temporary transcendence.

Favorite

 (c) 12/2020

This is what it’s like to be the favorite. Late night Moo Goo Gai Pan.
Just me and Daddy. And then we graduate to rum and coke.
Favorite is an occasional trendy dress, money for slip-ons,
the platform insole thwumping my sole. Secrets. Lots of secrets.
Then, with an increasing frequency I disappoint.
I disappoint as natural as larva unspooling itself to still born.
All my edges blunted long before the unexpected maelstrom.
To be the favorite is to be inhabited by betrayal.
An unhatchable pupa. Never to be an emerging imago.  

 

Music

(c) 12/22/2020

At the upright I suffered switched knuckles;
the metronome achieved the only possible perfection.
Emotions require a steady tempo.  Allegro had its place.
I’ve come to prefer Adagio. Could I ever be at ease?
At jam sessions Daddy snapped photos of me on the kit
as though this were evidence that he was loving.  
I looked so goddamned happy.
Maybe I was.
On top of the upright, orderly stacked sheet music
defied gravity and when his stacks took over the table
he over-rode family dinners.
Instruments littered our dining room.
Three trombones, the tenor and baritone saxophones;
no session went without water keys indiscrete spitting
that stained the carpet like permanently faded bruises.
There was an electric bass, and of course, my two guitars
electric and acoustic. I couldn’t fret or pluck.
My span always felt inadequate. A judgement
I could never quite put down.
By the time I’d reach high school boys
would let me know music took man hands.
Eventually drums crowded the table right out of the room.
One percussive or another was well within reach.
I favored the Guiro, mostly for the heft and the ease of it
though my patterns were erratic and out of sync
with the metronome.  
Dad bought in armloads of jazz and classical albums
to prove taste; He articulated the composer’s name
as though he and they were regular drinking buddies. 
“That’s De-BUSE-e”, he’d say.
I’d say “deb-u-see” just to hear him curse me. 

Prison Dreams

 (c) 2003

In these dreams I am not sure
if you are the prison guard
or the prison itself.
 
There are no locks. Hell!
There are not even doors
and the broken glass and debris
are easily enough stepped over.
 
I huddle in the piss drenched corner
clutching someone else’s child to my side,
the light outside is too good to be true.
 
You are as familiar to me as the stench of my own shit.
Who else would I turn to?  

Houseboat Dream

 (c) 2003 

In  this dream I live with my ex in a houseboat.
The living room rocks at 90-degree angles;
my beer bottle rolling out of reach. It’s impossible
to keep my cigarette lit. Shark fins slash through shag
like the carpeting were waves. We argue,
which is familiar as bumping fenders
but our mooring is more than slack.
We pitch out to open sea. Storm clouds gather.
Waves pull up into tsunamis
and all the while he still bitches about his missing socks.
Son of a bitch, he can’t handle the smallest tragedies.
I’m not sure how the hell I got back here.
How many times have I already left? 

The Landlady

(c) 2009  

By the way the Landlady holds her blade
it is clear she is competent.
It’s possible even, that she has found contentment
in this small kingdom of tracked footprints,
plaster chips, sprawled tools and baited mouse traps.  
Where would I be without her?
Reflection always has a price.
This endless restoration has kept her busy.
Sturdy as a three-legged stool
the Landlady stands, rubs her crimped knees.
She finally notices me waiting
to negotiate a price for this apartment.
I have been here for years.
How much? I ask. She yells, goddam
at the slovenly handyman whose work is so inept
it could be a performance piece.
Why is he even here - a misogynist
sabotaging  her work with screwdrivers and box cutters?
The Landlady rips sheeting from the window letting light in.
Jesus, she’s gotten old.  And so have I, waiting 
in a corner, draped in cobwebs like a weeping veil.
Do I want this restoration? It  will cost everything I have.

Haunted

 (12/19/2020 c)

I like to sit in bars and look for the ghosts of old boyfriends.
I haven’t had a single sighting yet.
Of course, chairs rattle. Floorboards creak
as an unseen hulk passes like a cold, winter draft.
Sometimes there is a silhouette, a fleeting
but distinctly human shadow cast in tease.
Once I took a photograph, hoping for orb backscatter.
Instead I captured three pool players giving me the bird.
Electromagnetic field detectors don’t work.
Hunting is all guess, imagination and wild conjecture.
I wish just one man was here.  There is danger investigating alone.
I always pack gauze and ointment.
What would I say if I saw them, if they saw me seeing them?
It all seems cruel. To say that I equate their dying
with abandonment. They should have attended to
their blood pressure, the faulty heart, the lure of pills,
the second chances that were last chances.
That I take their deaths personal. Crueler still,
to tell them what I’ve done since they left. 
All those Mai Tais, the faux honeymoon in Vegas,
in Mexico, the lovers and one-night stands,
especially the one who knew all the right moves,
books they recommended that I didn’t get around to reading,
the blood, the spleen, the body, all that terrifying breathing,
the letting go. The letting go.

Red

(12/19/2020)(c) 

Roses are red, Mary Beth. And red is a lure.
Fertile availability; a berry in the bush.
How relative red is. That passionate stop sign,
the burning poker in the fire, a graded paper.
 
Without refraction the only hue is black
-drenched invisibility
-a put-your-hands-out and don’t fall colorlessness.
 
Mary Beth, you said, “black feels like fear.”
I am fearless and unapologetically wear black every day.
Who needs lamplight when there is skin?
Put out your hands when you sense me coming.