Month: April 2016

protean

do you know
the myth of Proteus?
he was battling
some dude in ancient Greece –
maybe it was Zeus –
and they both shape shifted
constantly, each trying to overcome
the other’s defenses.
one became a snake,
the other became a hawk,
one became a wolf,
the other a bear,
one became water,
the other a bucket.
(or maybe that’s the Wonder Twins.
same same, no difference.)
also Taliesin with the salmon
and falcon and anyway
this is like us. you change
to get away from my
stranglehold and I change
to find a new one. this battle
could go on forever but eventually
I will win. I will find a shape
you can’t resist
if it takes the rest of my
lifetime. you might as well
give in now, because I
don’t know how
to quit.

the cage 2.7

as the bigger animal
you must be able
to detect
how my heart flings itself
like a finch, near
suicidal with fear
against the curves of my
ribcage
when I’m near you.

if not, you might not understand
my extreme caution
and timidity. it doesn’t matter
that I’m not your usual prey,
you could hurt me
or kill me
without even meaning to.

so if I sometimes attack you
and you were innocent,
I’m sorry. it’s just the terrified
aggression of the weaker animal
when it feels cornered
and is trying to make a stand
for its life. I will need patience
and repeated displays of mercy
and kindness
until it really sinks into my bones
that you’re safe.

you are safe, right?
you don’t mean me any harm?
how can I be sure?

empty nest

years ago I saw
this tiny birdhouse and bought
it, thinking I could get a bird
to come live there
and entertain
my cats.

by the time
I got around to putting
it up, I was told
it was for wrens, which
are very small indeed
and live in the low trees.
no wrens will come
to my high aerie
no matter how hard I try.
it’s not right for their
environment.

I put it up
anyway, a constant reminder
that you can have the nicest
home in the world, the most
lovingly constructed heart,
but you can’t
make the right one
move in.

stop.motion

I got on the wrong train
twice today, accidentally express
and was forced to watch
helplessly as I was carried
way beyond
my intended stop. in a hurry,
not thinking, I screwed
myself again and again.
even as I mentally berated
myself for betraying
my own best interests,
I couldn’t help but notice
that going too far
in the right direction
is better than not moving
at all.

Zelda 2.0

I’m out of poetry.
I’ve run dry. what’s the use?
poems are just lies
papering over the holes
in my bones where
sadness lives.

I’ve run out of ways
to make this slow death
sound pretty. when
my mind collapses
in on itself like a dying
star, all that’s left is cold,
hard science. there’s no
dress glittery enough
to hide my hideous heart, no
drink strong enough
to make me forget
to hate myself, no
fairy tale magical enough
to let me come out
a decent human being,
so why pretend?

Zelda (and eight other women
who are not remembered
at all) died
in a fire at the sanitarium
aka asylum aka loony bin
because she had been locked
in a room
waiting to get ECT
after Scott took everything
she had, her very words
published under his name,
her own novel trash-talked
to death.

I’m a new Jazz Age
glamour doll. where’s my Scott?
come plagiarize my diary,
savage my self-esteem and then
abandon me. I’ll do it all
again, if you’ll only
pretend to love me
long enough
for me to get some art
out of my veins and onto
the page.

my grocery lists

how many trees
have died for my
grocery lists?
thrown in the trash
with most of the page
left blank. well, rip me up
and put me in there too
because I’ve died for you
a hundred times and it’s all
meaningless, in a hundred years
no one will care, my using dead
tree bodies to write my ephemera
is just one of the eight million
reasons I’m going to hell, and when
I get there I’ll be confronted by the
sad-eyed garbage men
who will wordlessly show me
the cuts on their hands
from my orphaned and deadly
cat food can lids, and all the little
children in Africa who died
as a direct result of my wasting
water by running it in the bathroom
to give me privacy or sometimes
if I can’t pee right away, anyway
the point is none of them will
actually be in hell because they
are innocent and I’m just
the absolute worst – and even
saying that is narcissistic and
pathetic, a self-pitying
worthless loser trying to
draw attention to herself talk
and you see now how
this goes, a perpetual
downward spiral
forever like Fibonacci or some shit
I probably saw on a FB meme
because I’m
dumb like that –
they will just visit me in hell
and give me accusing stares
that say I’m not mad, I’m just
disappointed and I’ll probably
learn even more ways
I’m fucking up right now
without even meaning to
or knowing it so
as much as I hate being alive
half the time for no good reason,
I don’t really look forward
to dying, either. so please
call off that mob hit I ordered
on myself, because
I’m going to have to do something
far worse than death.

I think I’m going to have
to live.

fables

the lion lay crying
deep in the jungle. a little
field mouse
heard his weeping and happened
to be headed that way anyway
looking for his seeds and nuts
to sock away
for winter. he found he couldn’t
just pass by this elaborate spectacle
of suffering without at least inquiring
as to the cause.

the lion’s roars
shook the earth in his vicinity.
the frightened field mouse, trembling,
crept up to the
enormous supine form.

“why are you crying?”
he had to shout
to be heard over the
deafening racket.
“there’s a thorn
in my paw,” said the lion,
sullenly. “it hurts a lot
and I can’t get it out.”
he gnawed on the paw
angrily, but to no avail.

the field mouse thought,
what’s in it for me? he might
just eat me as soon as I’ve
helped him. I should just
run away right now
before he remembers that
he’s a predator and I’m prey
so I can live to scavenge
another day. but. then the lion
would keep on roaring
and caterwauling
and it was hard to sleep
with all that noise.
the mouse had
twelve new babies at home
that needed their rest,
and a tired mousewife
who was at her wit’s end.
if she found out he could have
stopped it, and didn’t?
he’d never hear
the end of it.

“I can help you with that,”
squeaked the mouse shyly,
and before the lion could demur,
ran over to the swollen paw and nimbly
plucked free the thorn
with his tiny sharp teeth.

the lion yowled in reflex but then
suddenly stopped, shaking his paw in
amazement. he licked it
experimentally.

“it doesn’t hurt any more!” said he in
wonder. he looked at the mouse
and a new gleam came
to his eye. his other paw shot out
and pinned the mouse
to the earth. “I could eat you
right now!” he growled menacingly.

“you could,” replied the mouse.
“but then who would tell you
about the three dead zebra
on the edge of the forest?
they’ve only been a little nibbled
by jackals.”

“you could be lying
about those zebra. a mouse
in the paw is worth
two in the veldt, my mother
used to say.”

“I helped you with that
pesky thorn, when I could easily
have walked away. believe me
or not.” and the mouse shrugged
as best he could under the weight
of the giant, velvety paw. he tried
not to tremble and mostly
succeeded. the big claws curved
slowly out of their sheaths, and
surrounded him in an ivory
cage.

the lion laughed.
“you think I can’t sniff out
three lousy zebra
by myself? or kill three more
if I felt like it?” and he flipped
the mouse into his mouth
like a popcorn kernel. crunch,
crunch, gulp, and the mouse was
history. his children never knew him,
and his widow remarried
the next season. (in retrospect
being nagged for a while
seems like a small price to pay.)

the morals of this story are these:
if you put yourself
in someone’s power,
don’t be surprised
if they use it over you
in ways you don’t like. mercy
is rare in those used
to the privilege
of always getting their own way.

how quickly we forget
what pain feels like
once the stimulus is subtracted.

if you get the choice to be a lion
or a field mouse, be the lion
or be prepared to get eaten.

the fine line

part of me is very angry.
part of me is hurt
again. the rest
of me is trying very hard
not to hate, because hate
is too close to love. anger
is still too much caring
for this bullshit. I must
detach. I must just
turn off the part of me
that still loves (desperately,
truly, madly, deeply)
because she has no place in
our world.

it’s better
for the art, he said.

no, but
okay.

those Playboys

you slightly invited me
into your life
and I came busting in
like a firefighter,
with a miner’s headlamp on
to shine all over you and
in the process accidentally
expose your dark, dark
underbelly. I caught you
sitting in the basement with
your black self-pity and
your piles of paper dollies
that you pretend
you’re in love with,
you shrank away and hissed
melodramatically through your fingers
like a lizard man
or the Chupacabra,
but this is actually
an episode of Hoarders
and I’m trying to
stage an intervention here.
and just like any
intervention, the subject
fights it tooth and nail
until one wonders, “Really, why
bother? this right here
is someone who
doesn’t want to be saved.
let him wallow in his own filth
amidst those Playboy magazines
from 1998 – why should I care?”

you seemed like
the kind of broken
that made me want
more than anything
to try to fix you.

but since it turns out
you’re über-happy
in your misery,
I’ll back out,
close the door quietly,
and leave you be.

don’t say
I didn’t try.
don’t say
I didn’t care.
it’s not my fault you’ve
been living in the dark
for so long, you’ve forgotten
what sunlight
even looks like.