Proof of Life
It’s been a few months now
since I typed in your name
and recognized the picture on facebook.
It felt unnatural and unjust,
like finding a revered legislator with a prostitute.
I don’t know what I expected or why I bothered looking.
You were so much larger than life
in my every thought and recollection after,
nothing in our time apart has amplified or ruined, but this is just wrong.
I’ve dreamed of you and wondered how you’ve aged
but never imagined finding out this way.
I can’t figure out if you’re in Florida or New York,
because I won’t send a friend request.
I doubt you’ve thought of me as much,
paused to wonder my location or properly spell my full name in a search.
Why would you?
You are too busy, sun tanned and smiling
from a kayak or boat.
Hell, I always hoped you were happy,
I just never wanted to see you so…..without me.
We never had a “real fight”.
You never gave me a reason to hate you,
maybe that’s why I failed so miserably while trying.
I never had the chance to get sick of filthy clothes, snoring
or morning breath.
We didn’t get to know each others faults well enough to get mean,
so you left me with all these idealizations instead of rage.
I have grown wide and bitter,
ashamed for you to see in some chance meeting, how I’ve let myself go
while you, at least from what I’ve seen in a small, teasing profile picture
have remained beautiful as if it had been a day instead of a decade since
I last saw you, thinking it couldn’t possibly be the last time.
Would you even recognize me now?
Thirty and tattooed like an angry biker according to men,
one of them is a thorned heart shape with your birth date dashed by a pen.
You thought there was nothing worse than inking a lover’s name,
but yours was no tribute, it’s warning.
So, I never give so much of myself again.
Would it make you sad to know you’ve had that effect
or are you too busy not thinking to be influenced?
Meanwhile, the most I can ever hope to be recovered
is like that of an alcoholic who stares too long at every bar passed
as if neon signs were fireworks and every barstool a comfortable sofa.
I flinch at people like some with acid reflux at the sight of food.
Anyone I’ve come close to caring for, I run from
and the only thing that anyone has ever written for me, comes to mind in an excerpt.
“Did you ever want to speed even though it could mean losing the race?
There is an air about you, something that I can’t seem to get a grip on,
a sense of mystery perhaps…
Does any of this make sense?
I’m certainly not a poet like you.
I think that I’m more of a graffiti artist of sorts.
Well tearfully, I’ve come back to this jigsaw puzzle of words.
I can’t find any words.
I’ve gotta…….run.”
Ten years later, I remember everything.
Do you?
It’s difficult to imagine while you are sun tanned and smiling
from a boat or kayak, like you’ve never taken anybody’s life.
Perfect
You cannot be this.
But, if anybody has ever so fully embodied a word
that a portrait should enter the dictionary like a scientist in church,
it would be you and yours.
I have never personally seen an aura
but when you wear white clothes, I think that I just have.
Logic and reason are not strengths of mine,
but like unidentified flying objects must eventually land,
I have to stop to acknowledge that the way I see you
could be no more reliable than an uncommon light in the sky.
You are not infallible.
You have faults and flaws,
unattractive qualities and bad habits. I mean, you must.
I just don’t know what they are.
I am tempted to launch a truth seeking mission,
to go directly to the source and ask boldly, “what’s your story?”
But, perhaps getting closer would only spoil the teaser
like reading a good book backwards.
So, I will refrain from skipping ahead.
I will let the chips fall like leaves in the wind
and not try to guess about speed or direction.
Who am I to question a gift of the earth?
I am not who you want.
This should be discouraging, disparaging, certainly reason to look elsewhere
and yet, I cannot.
You seek appendages God did not give me in this life
but I am willing to wait for the next
if at some point I could have a chance to reserve your time
by a dance card or diamond.
If I were a man, I would be on my knees in less than a year,
instead I pray that you get sick of their kind and open your mind, to me.
I want so badly to convey you to an audience,
but the first word that comes is so overused and trite.
It can describe landscapes and other people’s faces,
but not anything that you’re like.
You deserve more.
Something better than my writing abilities will ever procure.
Something like a myth
that can not ever be proved,
told over and over as if knowing came from appearing sure.
You walk towards me
and I labor as hard as birth to seem indifferent while feeling short of breath.
But, when your eyes are lowered or your back turned,
I abandon shame like a winter coat in a heated room.
I watch you brush hair from your face,
rest a hand around your waist like a lover would from the rear.
I watch you walking away
and how your arms sway as if part of some improv ballet.
I think “my God”
and wish there was a word as unique and unused as anything that you do
but there’s nothing else I can say.
You make your own earrings and are a walking peace sign,
some would write you off as a hippie
or bible thumper by your bumper sticker, but I doubt anything about you is that simple.
If it was, I would not be so arrested and could have stopped writing after two sentences.
Instead, I am intrigued ad nauseam
and at a loss to disprove
the existence of…… perfect
in EVERY occasion of your presence.
Take it back
I wish my heart were idle and abiding,
ALL week it has been flailing wildly,
slapping its sides against my chest
like an angry fish on a ship deck
trying to appeal to its captor through this convulsive hysteria.
I want to say something in the way of an apology or small assurance,
but I have never been at such a loss for even the concept
as I’m writing this.
Her voice was low, folded up into a tone
that made me think of crossed arms and her face in a set frown
I would never care to see, let alone cause.
It made my nerves limp and my heart pale.
It was as if she was prepared for what I was going to say
and couldn’t argue, so I went forward,
with a protest that couldn’t be aired.
Plodding with a moral sense that felt more like a diving board,
even the words from my mouth seemed thrown
as if meant to fool some closed audience
waiting for my lips to move.
I meant to say so much more,
I meant to be reasonable and explain,
but I became emotional and had to hang up,
as if I wasn’t allowed to feel so much before knowing she felt the same.
We’ve both had a chance now to say our peace
and leave the terms in a place that can be salvaged later,
but I am not comforted by them.
I don’t want to be consoled or force fed advice.
I won’t hear that it’s okay or alright.
Just for awhile, I want it to eat me alive,
so I will know better and catch it a little sooner, next time.
I need to have learned from my mistakes,
but I am far too fragile to be so righteous
and who the hell can distinguish mistake from fortune
before the opportunity for exchange has passed?
I am dizzy from my mind’s ill tendency to overanalyze
and infuse fiction with the nuisance of facts.
I’m not interested in closure.
Every minute I am alone with my thoughts,
all I want to do, is take it back.
Out there
There is a place we all go
against our will and right mind.
It’s a universal force we’ll all ride
but never acknowledge we’re driving.
Like being possessed,
we can say when it’s over
but never, while it’s going.
It will feel like the right thing to do
until you realize that you were
reading from a manual of mixed signals and reaching truths.
You had to know it could go either way
but somehow didn’t expect one.
Off you went, as if some assurance came in the doing
only to find, there is none.
“Nothing ventured, nothing gained”
is the standard and terrible cliche people will use
as if to evoke some personal epiphany or bottom line advice
like there is nothing to lose.
Well, let me tell you, this place
is cold and deserves more thought
than anything that has ever been quoted.
If I could say I’m never going back,
I would front the movement against being bold
and never take another risk with my broken parts.
I would stand at its door with caution tape and industrial strength
to ward you all away for your own good.
The place just gnaws at your cool
like a rabid dog making a chew toy of its fence.
It’s being naked while fully clothed,
a hyper vigilance that makes your arms and legs
feel like facial expressions you need to hide to keep from telling secrets.
It makes bitter old armor of anxious pure longing
until people have forgotten about the chances that are every so often
worth surviving the hindsight.
Feeling vulnerable and nauseous
won’t pass like a bodily function,
it just sits and spins between the tip of your tongue
and pit of your stomach,
until its will is done.
I know by now, when it’s fully progressed and beyond fighting
still, I’ll try to confront the proverbial heart
like a human being that can be rationalized with.
“LET ME GO”!!
I want to scream to my fool impulses
like some man handling marauder
who would look puzzled and scoff surly from my imagination
“I can’t, I’m part of you, stupid!”
She’s walking towards me
and I have to bite back the smile from my lips.
I turn my attention to nothing special
and focus my energy away from feeling
but, who am I kidding?
Each and every time
my toe taps this ledge like pool water,
waiting for bad experience and an impending phobia
to keep me from going in
but, I’ll be damned if it ever did.
I’m sure and swearing off love,
until I meet her
and fall fast back into puppet theater
like a reoccurring nightmare I can’t ever change or fully wake from.
I’m dragging my feet into a trench and weighing the risk
against the what ifs as though it were my decision.
My chest loudly drums and my nerves grate
knowing it could go either way but only expecting one.
I don’t wanna be out there again,
but I will, so, wish me luck.
Down
“Come down”, she goes
like some warped game show host
from an alternate world.
Her hand is always close
and I know what she will say next
as if I were reading for a role.
“Come now” she will hiss
like a serphant.
This place is warm
and I know it better than I have known any person.
I am already tempted to stay before she speaks again
“I am the only friend you need”.
Her voice projects over law, virtue and rebellion.
She can neutralize all the progress I have ever made
without the character of a threat.
She is seductive and attentive,
so adept to the play
she will have left the curtains drawn
so I can whittle away in the dark.
She keeps all the best songs in her jukebox
to fasten around my eardrum
like a primitive call for the mood
when something goes wrong.
“Come back”, she pleads
like a lover I’ve discarded but left waiting.
She is clever and won’t be anything less than conniving
when I am most weak.
“You know from here, the worst decision can look right,
no one is angry or disappointed
because you won’t be concerned by life.
I don’t ask for your purpose
or want to know why you’re so quiet,
come now, stop fighting”.
I am slipping and don’t want to be saved.
I want to wallow and let the beast fester until I have dissolved
like the carcass of a bed bug over the threads of my pillowcase.
There is the suggestion of weakness
and a bunch of guilt at the border of my resignation
but I am reluctant to care
with the promise of despondency by her spell.
I am not there yet and more than conscious of the others
with a world of trauma and just cause to label me selfish,
so maybe I am.
I turn a deaf ear and continue to be absorbed with my own shit
because it’s just easier and she said I can.
These days,
I would trade my calling for a good couch
with my favorite depressant on tap.
“Let it go”, she tells me
while my head runs around the room like a track.
“It’s alright”, her voice is never an authority
but can seem imperative as that.
“Stay with me”, she’ll beg until I’ve bowed inside.
“Come down”, she says and so I do, for a time.
Hopeless Romantic
Educated people are meant to evolve
into walking minds that cannot be easily swindled
by some frivolous ideal.
Cultivated in the generation of indifference,
we are well versed and cognizant
of the versatile entrapments that exist
merely to stunt personal growth.
Thus far, I am a disgrace among my own.
I am, a hopeless romantic
perfectly aware of the industry,
it’s stockroom full of barefoot promises
and wishing well wages that could not support my behavior
if it ever stopped running in circles
to feed on something with more substance than my self esteem.
The mistakes I’ve made in hot pursuit of a word
could make anyone feel better
about the risks they’ve taken for lesser things.
I would give the concept of my soul
to have gained something by now
or be granted the good sense to give up.
I have come so close only to relapse.
I have tried bitter and cynical like prescription drugs
and there are days that I could pass for both
if you did not know me well.
I can speak and write in their jaded dialect
and fool most.
I can even wear the face and you’d swear
I was a miserable bitch, until you get closer
and begin to see yourself.
I go through these cycles,
applying denial like Neosporin
to the cavern of hope I embody,
waiting for the damn thing to close.
In time I will betray my best yet efforts
of resignation and negative affirmations.
They have been loud and quite foreboding
so much that you would think
I’d learn something.
But, me and my kind
don’t respond so well to threats
or even a hard earned lesson,
least of all from ourselves.
I wear on the patience of my friends
who have forgotten what it is like to be possessed,
under the influence, infatuated or otherwise incapacitated
and so far removed from rational thought.
I refuse to die alone
with cabinets reserved for cat food
and boxes full of candles
that never saw the bottom of a flame,
waiting for love
years after I bought them to watch it made.
So, next time you are out
and think you are looking at someone
who is broken down or even mad at the world,
stop to consider that you may have just been swindled
by another hopeless romantic
working to appear cured.
Bus Ride
On a bus to NYC
I watched your hands as they looped in and out like
some ancient home remedy that was older than crocheting
and so uncommon for your age it said something about your fashion
that made me want to sit in the aisle and sunbathe in your aura.
I was thinking about trees and color and road
until they overwhelmed my stomach with motion.
I saw you over this woman’s shoulder,
there are always these obstructions and speed bumps
to caution the length of my cynosure like a moral compass.
So, I broke the posted signs with a bent knee and peripheral vision
like a hoodlum casing a store.
Even then there were only bits to be had that were only so gracious
as a turned head or small laugh.
Thank God for reflected image and tempered glass
that would deliver the contours of your hair
so finely combed and those hands;
that danced for me like a Shaman with a little bag.
You talk on your phone in such a kind voice;
I want to pull up the other end of the line like loose carpet fibers
to see where you’re coming from like a place I could piece together in clues
and tack to my wall as collage.
I am so jealous of these people
that hold your conversation like a bank of knowledge
I cannot heist with raised ears.
What are these things they know
like semiprecious stones I would rub in my pocket
as healing crystal, chipping away in secret
thumbnail strikes to find the core?
I am so immersed in this odyssey
I’m losing my sense of self
through tiny brain cells donated to the cause
like those magnetic ribbons making refrigerators of cars.
An oversized coin bank is all that separates my ears
while we ride.
You talk to the girl sitting beside you
but your voice carries and makes a deposit
that only I can count.
The vehicle you have, members of your family, summer plans and a small accident while driving home last weekend chime in my head in different sizes and points of interest
but there is a loud echo I cannot fill from the outside.
I want in, I want to be the scale where you weigh thoughts.
I want to put up the screen where you make word associations
like pipe dream and love life.
I would be a thermal blanket to every negative reinforcement you paint over in the compact mirror like a nike campaign “Cover, girl”.
I want to push up inside you like a male organ and force you to rethink the definition of what fits and who’s yours.
You slept with your feet on the front rails.
The windows were too dark for reflection
once we started moving so, I gave into the hour with heavy eyes
and my heart in sections.
The bus ride was a failed mission, there was not a single word exchanged or implied.
I caught your eyes a couple times, but they were meant for someone else,
maybe I should take that as a sign.
Low
If I could transfuse the voice in my head
to my car stereo,
would the swearing be censored
or any less effective
once emotion comes in to play like a heavy metal chorus?
My CD rotation is a sad genre tonight
but, just yesterday it was Limp Bizkit.
My mood is a coin toss call
of self sabotage I count on
like menstruation for makeshift asylum.
I’ve got that feeling people chase
through extreme sports or rationed drugs.
No, it’s not that high, it’s this low
I suffer to sustain
because it’s all I’ve ever known.
Some have to check out, after time
but I have stamina and regimentation
to support a tolerable fatigue of life.
It’s not that I do not enjoy friendship
and laughing–there are days
that I am a functioning socialite.
I simply cannot hold the face
like my alcohol.
My skin is more grey than beige
until I am held under light like a film print.
I am not a morning person or a sunflower,
I squint my eyes so much that I seem
to want for sleep everywhere that I walk.
It’s not that I am a night owl,
I am just very dark.
I feel the relation of my body to the earth
when it rains.
It’s a heavy nexus I miss
like the appendage of my mother
before there was fallacy in her instinct.
Thunder and lighting bolts
are the screaming and shoving from my youth
re-enacted as a ballet.
I teethed on turbulence
and now I salivate for pain.
It’s not that I don’t want to be happy,
It’s just, I don’t know how.
The only way I can love
is alone and from a safe distance.
Outside of my imagination and without a spiked drink,
I have needs I cannot condone or relieve.
I move like hydroplaned tires when touched.
I tense myself short of two arms span
and make excuses about personal space
to curtail interaction and avoid any risk of being hurt.
It’s not that I don’t want someone,
sometimes I’m just not sure it’s something I deserve.
Take
Take my anger,
read like mouths moving out of place over censors,
felt like a facial expression with covered eyes.
I wring my forehead and drag my hands down my cheeks
trying to create a face that will not conceal rage in any matter of time or manipulative device, but it never holds.
You take my anger
like a seafood platter squirming
in its net for salt water and ocean floor.
I would be so pissed, if i could
but you take and you take
until i am left clenching my teeth
more like a smile than a cringe.
God, I hate you…
well i wish i did.
Take my savvy like common sense.
I can almost forget how sharp
my mind turns in cultivation
to your motives.
How attuned the accoustics of your mouth are to my ear
that I even hear “I don’t love you”
in “Good morning” and “What’s up”?
You underline each instance I am hurt
like some idiosyncrisy you own.
You will take everything
but, responsibility.
Maybe while you are sleeping
I will weave to the backs of your clothing,
that insignia
that might save my successor
some angiush.
Perhaps she will have the vigilance
to invest in armor I have been too self-conscious to wear over my chest.
Take scissors
with a rusty metal mouth
to my papier mache heart,
it’s yours.
Carve your initials into my palm
between my head and my life line
so some bushy haired woman
with blue eyelids and a heavy
Jersey accent
can tell me where I went wrong
too late for anything to be taken back, which just figures.
What if
What if…
I don’t want to fight anymore?
What would happen
if i threw that down like a real option with a slammed table for dramatic effect?
If i just let my fists fall open with blood lined nail impressions
like an act of submission and sacrificial spilling, could those ugly palms still pray
for a break so far past the date of admittance?
If i just jumped up and down
with a prepared sob and limp neck
like a toddler on his way to bed, could i get some type of extention or special treatment?
Could that work at my age if i looked slightly disheveled
and the tears were warm,
if i was sniffling and shouting with breaks in my voice, startling in pitch and polluting with noise
I DON’T WANNN NNNNA FEEL ANYMORE!!!
JUST STOPPPPPPPP IT!..Wahhhhhhhhh!!!
What if..
Why not?
My eyes are burning
and my chest feels heavier than the weight I am forced to carry in a D cup.
What if i just didn’t wake up?
What if i just lay here until my stomach grows louder than the circles that talk in my head?
Would I then know what was real
from what was not?
If I just refused to move and tested my body’s will to survive, who would win?
Would it be worth that one moment of clarity?
I have done worse things for obscurity, so, what if i did?
Oh, how swift I would trade that kind of hunger
if i could conquer just one hour of mine.
What if… I just
gave in?
Let that hellmouth swallow me
in whispers and replay?
If i checked in to some women’s clinic or
psycho ward,
waiting for liver spots and wads of frayed gray hair
leaving my head like i wish to God i could.
Between my fingers, compulsively combing
for the calm that comes from following through with the act
like an order, but it’s nothing like that.
It’s chaos with a pause for anal retention, so when people wonder
they kind of smirk and say “oh”
like it’s that simple, only it isn’t.
It’s stronger than i am
and i am… exhausted.
What if i can’t hold my own?
So??
What if I do give in?
Who’s going to care?
I have learned the hard way that I am recyclable
for $7.50 an hour, especially when they pay me 10
to do anybody’s job
with a little more experience and bigger arms.
So, what if i just stopped showing up for work?
What if I just locked myself up in my room,
writing about seclusion and unrequited love
under my mother’s roof and pensive frown?
Till it stops, till i die…
like Emily Dickenson lived.
Why not?
What if?
