Tag: poet

An Exam Most Will Fail

Addled light beams curve around me as though I were winding like a mountain road and made of glass. Wherever I am, I am not. What is it to be in a place? I miss the homey vernacular of my youth. Customs coat us in sticky colors that ultimately create us. Row your boat gently down the stream. But life is not a dream. It is an exam most will fail. I get seasick. My legs are stems, and I am an amalgamation of flowers clamoring over one another to be heard before dark rolls in like a crime scene cleanup crew, removing my essence.

I Was a Marshmallow

Sincere silence is honest with me, unlike the electricity that wiped my inner hard drive partially clean and diluted my mind. The futile nature of remembering my life smells like a campfire dying in a cold rain. I miss 1999. Not anything about my life in particular that year. Just the world before society lost its collective mind.  In the beginning, I came home and slept from the anesthesia. In the evenings, I was a marshmallow. But then I was hollow, unaware of anything but a voice saying “What would you give to raise a child in a world that no longer exists?” Glacial mistiming of fertility and luck. The world ends in an orgy of rage, and we all drown in the torrents of tears. I cannot build my daughter a raft. I sink.

The Nuthouse

Windows to concrete. Ghosts of sanity smoking together as though huddling against the world. Maneating sedatives prowl the corridors looking for victims. You will not shut off my personality. You will not condemn my name as unfit. The hunted can hunt. My 9 year old self watches, anxious and disappointed. I peer around the corner, braless and determined. I’m going to dance like a ballerina to any tune they play because I have to get out of here. My soft soul can’t survive it.

Prairie Like Tinfoil

Jilted raindrops storm off from the clouds. The prairie wrinkles and crumples like tin foil – and it’s just as shiny. Angels play Uno under a lone tree, who helps one of them cheat. I walk toward them but will never reach them. The prairie has other plans, as does the dragonfly shimmering beside me. I’m pretty sure he’s just Death singing a lullaby only I can hear. My soaked slip sticks to me like the music of my husband’s deft fingers. Lingering in the cool air, half evaporated ghosts of truths long lost.

Only Jesus and I See It

The flavor of his chocolate pie is deafening. Today is marbled, a muse of comfort. Or maybe elegance. I’d like to say comfort and elegance can “coexist” like it says on those stupid bumper stickers, but for me they seldom can. Around the table, saints with no stigmata. But the barbs in my brain break free frequently, and deep in my husband’s psyche, a wound tears softly, as though my husband’s essence were perforated. His halo is turquoise and silver and shines like the sun. Only Jesus and I see it.

Time

Time is seldom sober, and he trips a lot. He tried to pick me up in a bar once, and I told him I had a boyfriend. He didn’t know the boyfriend was poetry, but silence is sweet like fudge. Now, Time loops over my arms in an embrace, pulling me from my quaint little dollhouse – and I tell him I’m not interested. He slides his slick tongue in my ear, licking my discontinued brain, and whispers, “ I have my way with all of you eventually.” Gradually, the dollhouse recedes as I enter a place where Time is meaningless.

Depression

Beneath a violet sky, I tap my slippers together 3 times and end up in DC. It isn’t home. I wish I could untap my slippers. But it will have to do. The day unfolds like a receipt, a radicalized holiday that smells oddly hairy. This place withers my soul, who really ought to be tougher by now but is battered and worn by shifting storms of mood. The day weighs 25 pounds – not too much to carry but enough to ensure I’ll be tired. Depression fills me formlessly like water, filling up the cracks and crevices of my body and mind.

Prose Poems Scare Me

Idiosyncratic ice, sculpted by wind and sun and cold, seals the world like lamination. You can see it if you look closely, a thin, almost wet sheen on handrails and sidewalks. Underneath ice, my heart is a room everyone walks out of, saying, “The yellow walls were garish, and the music stilted.” In my yard, a carousel filled with the dying in their Sunday best. The ice protects the world from cold wind with cold water, and I find myself mulling over the concept of wasted desert effort. Prose poems scare me. They’re so true that no one believes them.



My Novella

The eccentric novella brewing and screwing her way through the sizzling synapses across my brain is hard to catch. Pick up your plot and follow me! The sun over my house judges my unproductive, polychromatic day. Language was my first love. I try to harness my words as they sparkle defiantly, trying to escape the little woman controlling my tongue, who snatches them up and places them on it to be conveyed. The novella, being an angry, unwilling confederation of words, tries to escape. She puts up a fight. She’s feisty. Still, the woman in my voice box, the one I abuse, dictates her from plot to syntax into the phone. Afterward, I answer the phone and hear the rush of my own blood, a private sea. And somewhere, the eternal hammering of nails.