Lucky
Reincarnation or the blue hope of heaven
carry no promise.
Maybe I will lay in my shell, and drift away slowly
or be suddenly ripped from the story
on my way to the grocery store
a mere two blocks from home.
Will I close my eyes or keep them open?
It doesn’t matter to the dark
that comes either way,
with or without express written consent.
Maybe the line between my body and mind,
that I worked so hard in my mediation practices to erase,
will.
No need for these feet and hands
or the doing and undoing of knots
real and perceived.
will the long last exhale where the colors
and shapes that I recognize as reality
will be just that,
before they are forgotten completely?
But sure as shit,
my last electric thought will be
how lucky I am
to have had this one chance,
this one life,
with my one beating heart,
and you.
Postponed
All those times you prayed for cancellation.
All those paragraphs you read halfway through, life being too short
For bad poetry.
The forwards, the afterwords skipped in patiently
Are all penciled into your day planner.
Goddamn the year of the wild lies and the terrified other.
Goddamn the bloodline so disappointing you deny them,
Like Jesus understood,
alone and trembling
in the garden, with the truth surrounding you
like a sickness.
The contents of your china cabinet are in the basement
on a card table waiting to be sorted out into the wanted
and unnecessary.
Those things you purposely kept because “who knows”.
That was your tenuous grasp on the unexpected.
Your backward way of ‘letting go’ of control.
But the changes came in the form of subtraction, not addition.
Now those extra things, they need to go.
Self-improvement is the order of the day and we are ashamed.
You will get to know yourself better
in the dirt in the corners of your home.
Another update
Another reason to cry
How in the world? What the FUCK!
You don’t know anything or anyone, you can’t.
Searching your soul with a magnifying glass
For a pinprick of a silver lining.
Could you forget where you are?
Could you laugh with a stranger?
Relish the color of the leaves?
Count your blessings?
Roll a joint?
Through your dirty windshield
As you wait for the groceries to be delivered to your trunk
You see a red hat.
You can’t read it through the swaths of grime
But it makes you sick all the same.
You image yourself
tearing out the throat
of the person wearing it
with your teeth.
But look, here come your groceries.
You push the thought aside,
put on your mask
And pencil that in too.
Maybe next year.
Canidae
Had I noticed
the dark gray of the heavily trafficked floor
as I stepped off the elevator?
Winter inside,
winter out.
I had left work and headed straight to the hospital.
He was waiting for me.
I remember his voice choking as he said,
“Yeah, yeah…” when I tried to console him
over the phone.
You have been gone for about an hour,
they were letting the family say their goodbyes.
They waited for the granddaughters to arrive.
They waited for me.
I didn’t stop very far into that doorway.
I skulked around the edges.
That tiny crumb of panic in my condolences.
I remember that my son did this after his baby brother was born.
He stopped dead coming into the hospital room
and had to be ushered in with a
stiff hand
by his grandmother.
Tears hanging on the sills of his eyes.
So terrified to disrupt the order,
To hear the cries and not understand why.
Terrified to feel too deeply.
Trying to disappear like a fox and a den.
Eyes gleaming and frightened and selfish.
A different sort of birth now,
but a similar terror.
I could see your shell on the bed.
You were gone into the ether.
Absorbed was your last breath,
Into the lungs of your children
as they stepped all over each other
recounting your last minutes on earth,
overly detailed as your children tend to be when telling a story.
No one quite had the timeline right
Even though only moments had passed.
It was fortunate no one was paying attention to the other
so they all kept their truth.
I drifted,
unable to hold my attention still.
I inverted my eyes
checked my phone.
A comically huge clock hung on the wall,
showing me time left; times up.
More stories about you,
some laughter.
There is something so funny about someone who thinks
it isn’t.
The ritual of looking back at where you once were
took half an hour.
Finally we hoisted our purses and wrapped our necks with scarves.
Like yesterday, like tomorrow.
I took a deep breath, relieved to be standing
So close to the door.
Outside the snow fell hard.
Our conversation turned blessedly back to the weather
as it always does in the place you were born
We have to drive home in it.
We have to go on living and thinking and doing.
We have children to raise and deadlines to meet.
And I have a cold den in my heart to return to,
before it’s too late.
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