(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 balance.
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.
As I lift and turn
I wonder if you are thinking
how pretty I am—
or if you’d rather
I break my neck?
(c) 2015
I’ve finally begun
throwing them away—
the grade school report
card
where my 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—
the only true one.
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 her.
She was never as bright,
as beautiful,
as gifted as I wanted.
She was all she could be.
I’m sure she was
enough.
(c) 2016
When we met, we reached for love
but found instead a folie á deux.
I said, “Love is painful”—
so you proved it.
I said, “Daddy never saw the real me”—
You tore up my poems
without reading them.
You said, “You’re fat.”—
I
ate more.
You said, “Mothers are cruel.”—
I hit your knees with an iron pipe.
You said, “Life is lonely.”
I left.
I found it gratifying,
and when I ran into you years later
you said you missed it too.
(c) 2016
In this dream everyone is happy.
You find your way home, fully clothed.
The key fits the lock, the locker isn’t bare.
No tsunami crashes, covering the street
in tossed cars and uprooted trees.
The earthquake has gone still.
The most beautiful woman in the world
holds her hand out to you.
In this dream all the puzzles are solved.
Metaphors are understood.
This is the dream you always wanted—
the one you were afraid to dream.
(c) 12/2020
Miscast
I
should have given up
playing
the ingenue decades ago
but
none of the other roles fit.
The
harpy comes close.
On
occasion, I shave my head
and
swagger like rough trade.
I
can’t make it convincing.
I
am not as gifted as I would like to be
with
posture, attitude, phrasing—
though
I almost passed for mother once.
And
he was young—
they
are always young.
Eternals—until
time catches up.
The
first time I saw him
I
thought, There he is—
My
split-off animus.
I
saw what I wanted.
It
wasn’t him.
I
have a faulty aperture—
something
in me misaligned,
a
loose screw sprung years ago.
I
never learned how to behave
around
a human,
neither
how to hold
nor
how to be held.
(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 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—
beauty limited
to a moment of ripeness.
Humans are born with an innate ability
to separate immediate beauty
in 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.
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.
We touch and are infinite.
And the moment after—
end tables darken, flesh recedes
to mahogany and form. Walls
like madly growing vines shoot
up from the floor.
As space reassembles, solid and
rigid,
we notice the chill from the
window,
snowfall, the graying shoulders of
the day.
My back is cold.
Time no longer timeless.
Oh, how fortunate, those gods—
Within your arms,
before the world returns.
(c) 12/2020
This
is what it’s like to be the favorite—
late
night Moo Goo Gai Pan,
just
me and Daddy.
We
graduate to rum and coke.
Favorite
is
a trendy dress,
money
for platforms, albums, books.
Then,
I disappoint—
inevitable
as larva turning.
My
edges blunted
long
before the storm.
Favorite
is
betrayal.
An
unhatchable pupa—
never
an emerging imago.
(c) 2003
(c) 2003
In
this dream
I
live with my ex in a houseboat.
The
living room pitches—
my
beer bottle
rolling
in and out of reach.
It’s
impossible
to
keep my cigarette lit.
Shark
fins slash through shag
as
if the carpets were waves.
We
argue,
which
is familiar—
our
mooring gone slack.
We’re
carried out to sea.
Storm
clouds gather.
Waves
rise into tsunamis—
and
all the while he is still bitching
about
his missing socks.
The way the Landlady holds
her blade
it is clear she is
competent.
She is content
in this small kingdom
of tracked footprints,
plaster chips,
sprawled tools.
Where would I be without
her?
This endless restoration keeps
her busy.
Sturdy as a three-legged
stool
the Landlady rubs her crimped
knees.
At last she notices me
waiting to negotiate
a price for this
apartment.
I have been here for
years.
How much? I ask.
She shouts—goddam—
at the handyman
whose work is so inept
it could be a performance
piece.
He fumbles with screws,
box cutters—
undoing her work.
The Landlady rips the sheeting
from the window.
Jesus, she’s gotten old.
As have I—
waiting in a corner,
draped in cobwebs
like a veil.
Do I want this restoration?
It will cost everything I
have.
(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 finger.
Electromagnetic field detectors don’t work.
Hunting is all guess, imagination and wild conjecture.
I wish just one man was here.
There is danger in 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 I equate their dying with abandonment.
They should have attended to their blood pressure,
the faulty heart, the lure of pills,
the second chances were last chances.
That I take their deaths personally.
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,
the books they recommended that I didn’t read,
the blood, the spleen, the body,
all that terrifying breathing,
the letting go.
The letting go.
