my high horse

I stand on moral high ground,

peer down at a broken landscape,

whole cities filled with people

 who have wronged me, and in

my most pained horror, I cry out

 ///

You’ve wronged me.

 ///

I have the warmest blood, a heart wide open

 and honest and I love with a passion

matched only by the gods.

But as with the turning of the sun, wrong me—

how dare you wrong me—and

where flames once raged, ice burns in wild fire fashion.

 ///

This is how I make myself a

martyr for no cause save

my own vanity. And this is

why the odds are stacked, favoring

the Devil and my self-prescribed isolation.

(See me twenty years from now and see me

suffering at the hands of my own perfection).

 ///

Yet here I continue to stand, on my moral high ground.

And here I stand

 ///

alone.

Fool.

////

He tells me he loves me.

He says the most wonderful things.

I am so beautiful, my mind holds

such interesting thoughts, my body moves

in  such a way and my touch

moves him.

We can spend full days in bed,

full of love love love, and I am

the one he wants to wrap his world around

and never let go.

And all these things, they

fit together so perfectly that I am

perfect for him and he is mine.

He tells me he loves me.

 ////

Fool.

 ////

He tells you, too?

 ////

But he tells me he loves me (you fucking fool) and he says

the most wonderful things.

North Carolina circa May 2004

He said I speak like

an artist. I was describing

the approaching thunderstorm

on a ferry ride across Pamlico Sound.

////

An artist.

////

He said I should write

something. But I’ve battled

that terror Mediocrity

and in inebriated defiance

denounced poetry.

////

Poetry.

////

I hate just the word.

I said, I write clichés,

over-sketched, in-the-lines

messes about things everyone

already knows.

////

But he said I speak like

an artist.

////

An artist.

March 24, 2006: Savannah, Georgia

Somewhere out on Perimeter Rd. lies a little

cemetery of unknown graves called Belmont. Thirty years ago

some workers unknowingly exhumed  the skeletal remains.

They dug up all the bodies they found and

removed them to a desolate scrap of land, each one

marked with a metal plaque, like the ones Grandma put out

in her garden to label vegetables.

Except these ones are marked with serial numbers that

don’t mean anything to anybody, numbers typed on sheets of paper

and locked away in a filing cabinet somewhere on base.

After the construction workers dug the skeletons up,

they laid down concrete for a tarmac.

Rusted artillery act as military decorations next to the fence

and yellow and white wildflowers bend a little in the breeze.

They grow in clumps of three.

 ////

It’s a Wednesday afternoon, and I think it’s going to storm.

That balmy feeling travels on the wind, and

dark puffy clouds, like bags beneath tired eyes,

shift quickly across the shrinking sky. It’s quiet.

Except when the low-flying aircraft take off or

land on an airstrip a couple of miles away,

away from Belmont cemetery and the muted green war machines

and the pretty little flowers.

And away from me.

Finally, passing years stack up high enough so I can see the

Things That Were

without the blurred lens of childish reality skewing my memories.

I now own stories that belong to me alone,

no hand-me-downs here,

and I have bridges that I didn’t just burn

but strapped dynamite to their struts, then fled wildly from,

never once thinking to glance back. And there are other things:

the age of my grandparents,

it doesn’t seem so old anymore, and I judge a man by his ability to provide,

an obligation I never imagined giving away to anyone,

always keeping it safe and keeping it close.

////

And so these years, they stretch out before me,

provide a perspective I didn’t think I’d get a chance to get,

with their blessing on repeat:

I have plenty of time but maybe not so much as I think.

////

But for all this perspective, for all the time,

like dead bodies, left in my wake,

and for its endlessness (Siddhartha’s river of multitudes),

why is it that a few days away from you

turn me into such a miserable little beast?

////

Because I have no perspective when

it comes to you.

Phoenix—a brilliant blaze of feather and

color and flame. The desert sky is brown only

above the big western towns; here, where you

fly, it’s a pale blue, pale from the heat of your

fiery wings—it all pales

surrounding the heated waves of your disintegration and reformation.

////

                            I’m told I chose them wrong. It’s always

                            the same, just a different face and a different

                            name, and there I go again, handing over my

                            autonomy, so cavalier. But life is so much

                            easier when you’ve got someone to help

                            make your decisions.

                            Or make them for you.

////

The burning is easy, all wrapped up in flame.

There’s only flame. The smoke, the

shimmering colors and sparkling heat—mere features

of the show visible only to those who might catch

your fiery descent. But to you, it’s just fire, all-

consuming, disintegrating, cathartic fire.

Ash, once feathers and hollow bone,

weighs nothing now. Nothing.

No thing remains here as it was at the

peak, before the fall.

////

                             Saturday night. We occupy two different places and

                             spaces. I attack your character as subtly

                             as I know how, hoping you’ll read these clues and then

                             the place and space you occupy will be far removed from me.

                             The lamp hanging over the kitchen table sways in the

                             night breeze, but it’s Day Five of summer

                             and the wind moves too heavily to provide anything but

                             a reminder that it is so miserable here sometimes.

                             This time.

                             This time, I’m no different—only he is with

                             his different face and different name and

                             everything else remains unchanged, a constant

                             I’ve grown to love since I first dabbled in love.

                             They are all the same. But that’s only

                             because I am the same. As always, as

                             infuriatingly always.

////

A final burst of flame, and the weightlessness of the ashes

compounds and thickens, and feathers—brilliant

ribbon candy-colored things—sprout over a reforming

body and beak and bone and talon.

A memory: The climb is best near the peak, just before the

fall, when the thermals and wind patterns carry

most of the burden.

Free.

So free.

////

Climb

Climb

Burn

Fall.

                Climb.

A passing glance in the mirror, and

damn, you look good.

But stay awhile and watch the flaws

sharpen and the demons come out,

each one wanting his part to play.

But is the devil so bad? The fear of him

drives me further,

twenty years farther into introspection and retrospection.

To my own self, I make a glorious fool,

displayed in print and paper,

more vividly in mind.

Amazing how those memories shoot through

the hard-packed earth, stubborn

and thirsty for the light of day. Even the oldest of the them,

even those farthest from my heart,

find a renewed place in the sun.

 ////

And oh, you demons, you say,

Look where you failed once, twice, so

many

many times.

You paint a lucid picture of my

failings in a shimmering vulgarity,

aggressive and profound.

And you are right.

I’ve failed.

I’ve been angry and I’ve been wrong and jaded and hurt,

any number of terrible things.

Peer quickly, a passing glance, and demons, you are right,

 ////

but stay awhile and I will prove you wrong.

////

I’ve a gift—I’m human.

I can be many things (I am so

many

many things).

My existence rests solidly in the in-between,

in the dark spaces, the varying shades of gray that aren’t

evil or mean, or pure or perfect,

they simply are.

And I have an advantage—

I know my darkest things, and I know my most stunning.

I may be a glorious fool, but the longer I stare in that mirror,

the greater I grow.

Like children at a slumber party,

our late night whisperings drifted

into darkness.

You never told me you’d stay; it was

an assumption made,

 well before the full-throttle pouring of

hunger and truths and Light

slowed to an intermittent drip,

and then,

to nothing at all.

 ////

Sometimes,

I think I still hear you telling me secrets

that anyone could know,

but when I waken—

just enough to remember your words—

I find

it was the arriving train’s cooling engines,

wind crinkling the plastic covering on the neighbor’s roof,

the quietude of a night alone.

 ////

A soul,

well-trained in combating drought and uncertainty,

would recognize these as subtle offerings,

an acclamation to

mark your presence,

 ////

not its void.

laundromat

Sunday before nine a.m. and
the only sounds are of the
morning news (it’s always happier on the
weekend, impressive for Philadelphia), the twisting hum of washing machines,
and the crinkling plastic bags emptied of their dirty clothes.
////
A man and his teenage daughter work side by side but
don’t speak. He’s got giant headphones on
and he taps his fingers
against his pant leg. My guess: Van Halen’s
new album loaded onto an iPod tucked into the
pocket of his pumpkin orange puffer vest. His hair has a distinct Lyle Lovett quality about it.

One of those toy machines
(with the claw that never grabs hard enough) hangs out in
the corner near an ATM. Inside
a smiling pink bull sits, and I
might actually be able to win it
if I had a dollar bill.
////
20 minutes left in the dryer, a quick fluff ‘n fold and I’ll be out of here. One more week of making things dirty to spend an hour and $11.50 to get them clean again.

I beg you to ask me what’s wrong. Instead,

the silence responds: “Why don’t you just tell him?”

What’s this? Something blocks my tongue, holds it against the roof of my mouth.

 ////

Oh, right,

my ego.

 ////

I try to make it meaningful in some greater context,

rationalizing my childhood, my adulthood,

my broken hearts and hearts I’ve (mercilessly) broken.

Too proud. I’m too proud.

I confide to you without saying one damn thing:  

if you’re not aware enough to be aware of my avoidance,

then you don’t deserve to know,

and here, let’s make a hash mark on the wall,

a prisoner’s count of days, signifying I’m better than you;

this time I’ve won.

 ////

So I take a shower. Anything to make things no

worse than they already are.

The guy in the upstairs apartment must be washing his dishes;

the water pressure dulls and flairs in varying degrees between scalding and Arctic.

Kind of like us tonight.

 ////

But, honey, no matter what I say tonight, please know,

I’m wrong. I know I’m wrong. I know

I’m too much sometimes.

When I was a little girl, I thought that

the man who tames me has to be one strong motherfucker.

Turns out, no one can tame me.

But you know that,

you know there’s no taming either of us.

We are wild animals after all. And sometimes

you are so much better than me.

 ////

Still, ask me what’s wrong, and I’ll make it all your fault.

Sometimes it’s what I do best, and sometimes what I do best is

feel guilty over my shortcomings even as

I accuse you of yours.

Like.

Right.

Now.