When the first faint lines
of wilting appeared on a petal’s edge,
like the crinkle of an old woman’s eye,
the rose cast off its blossoms
and waited naked
for the frost.
It was no longer a rose.
when you and I were sixteen
and our parents felt like our children
or our boyfriends wanted to be our boy friends
we wrote silly lists that made us smile:
crackling ice cubes
unfortunate last names
hand-me-downs
hearing a song you love but forgot about
anything colour-coded
running for the bus and just making it
snowflakes caught in eyelashes
holding hands
small dogs on staircases
Simon & Garfunkel
the word “chesterfield”
flared nostrils
waking up with perfect hair
waking up with ridiculously bad hair
finger-painting
messages fingered in mirror steam
profound graffiti
talkative strangers
old friends
Talk of miracles
turns my mind to the days
of gods who threw down lightning bolts
and mortals who danced to summon the rain.
The gaps in human knowledge are always penciled in
with splendid imagination, like the blanks in a Mad Libs story.
Yet there is no comfort in living
so far from bedtime story beliefs
– miracles, true love, anthropocentric Gods,
the supremacy (or even competence) of humankind –
without stubborn faith in a twofold bedrock:
the strength to claw my way out of any hole
and the hands that reach down to help me.
This poem was written in response to Poetry Prompt # 115: What do you believe? on Read Write Poem.
My generation plays a game that goes: If you could live your prime through any era, which would you choose?
Katie belongs in the late Eighties, nursing on brat pack movies through her high school years – fresh from the theatre, not crystallized in HD. She’d flirt wildly with the notion of moving to NYC, spending five hours on her makeup before dashing out to outlaw parties at the local Burger King dressed in skin and sequins. The rest of her life could be spent telling outrageous stories she couldn’t quite remember because of all the chemical drugs.
Andrew would wake up just a few years earlier and fritter his quarters away in the arcades. All his favourite tunes would still be on the radio.
And me, you know I couldn’t be happier anytime but the Sixties, when the wind blew hard enough to move people, to tear things down. When fashion was political, not corporate, and there were causes to dies for in good company. Chain me to a tree or lock me in a school and I’ll play you the five chords I know.
Fun game, but it always leads to the inevitable, terrifying question: given the chance, would I? Would I run away to clubland? Would I join the revolution?
And then: when I look back on this era, what will I have missed being a part of?
It could be worse. Sometimes I thank God for the Internet, and for 9/11 – the only things that kept this decade from being as lame as the Nineties.
I pinch the skin of my arm, hard,
on the subway platform. Too many times
have I asked myself, Is this a dream?
and said Nooo and moments later awoke.
My brain has a top-notch video card
and way too much memory; when I try
to spot a dream through little tricks
– light level adjustment, stationary text,
tactile precision and complexity,
the clarity of every texture and detail –
every sensation swells right up to greet me.
Even now, as I carefully inspect every
pore and follicle on this red, throbbing welt,
I’ll never be quite certain.
This poem has been taken down for submission to a publication. Apologies for the inconvenience.
An author in esteem only, I return to writing fiction,
though my literary tendons have atrophied, decayed,
after all these comatose years. They will not trust me,
preferring to sleep folded in the footlocker at the edge of my bed,
(muttering pretty snips of sentences while they dream)
but still they are glad to be out, tumbling words
across my page in a red patter; my house is littered
with fledglings and ancient eggshells.
Under the clarity of instinct, they have taken
a hacksaw to industrious panic, to the lubricious want of status,
and in doing so claimed a second childhood; they are clowns,
grinning from within the jaws of a toothless lion.
This poem was written in response to Poetry Prompty #114 on Read Write Poem.
Baby, get your can:
this plant needs watering.
Its leaves are folded in a heap
like shirts waiting for the iron
and they smell like rainy Mondays
and empty houses and missed goodbyes.
Baby, take it away; I can’t bear
to look at it any longer.
are building a crustaceous shell
like a lobster, boiled and breaded.
One is the torn liner in an old woolen coat,
the other is wood polished with ammonia.
They are mountains crumbling to sand,
faded maps made of November tree bark,
sentient lumps of chalk and driftwood.
The winter wind blows them down
on the ground like leaves, bitter and dead.
Note: the cold weather has made my hands dry, but not nearly as dry as I exaggerate them to be in this poem. Don’t worry, I have heard of moisturizer.
ALSO, check out my latest LAID post: Sure he's a slut, but what does that have to do with politics?
How can you expect so much of me when you know we’re the same person with the same fickleness? With the same weakness for passive amusement and mindless games and just sitting very still. We’re the fool child who wastes his allowance on candy and never has anything to show for it but fat and cavities. Don’t you realize I have no more motivation than you, just nearer deadlines?
You ask a lot, and I’m really trying. I want it all as much as you do – the finished projects, constructive lifestyle, cultivated relationships – and I know I’m the one who has to make it happen, but it just doesn’t get any easier. We both keep thinking it will, but it just doesn’t.
Thanks for cleaning the cat box and taking the chicken out of the freezer. Thanks for doing the dishes and making the bed and flossing our teeth. Thanks for the sleep deprivation too, asshole.
Love,
Tomorrow Girl
My father subscribed to the old coffee mug adage, You don’t know anything until you’re thirty.
At ten years old, this infuriated me; according to coffee-stained bubble letters on the side of a little ceramic bucket, I was to remain in my lowly childhood ignorance for three times my current lifetime. I knew how to read and write, after all, and didn't that count for something?
That coffee mug’s been haunting me lately, as I count the final hours of my early twenties and try to remember back
when being good was like colouring crayon
inside thick black outlines
when I had more opinions (my father’s) about politics,
and less understanding
when sex was bad and alcohol worse and drugs
turned you crazy or criminal
when religion wasn’t shrapnel
Life since high school has been an exercise in unlearning. A part of me looks forward to thirty, when allegedly I will know something.
Snap the hitch
A slip of a stitch
The flip of a switch
The scratch of an itch
Set the gauge
A light on the stage
The turn of a page
The end of an age
This poem has been taken down for submission to a publication. Apologies for the inconvenience.
I’m tracking your footprints
across eighty-eight dusty keys,
shadowing you with my clumsy fingers.
I’m wandering your labyrinthine lyrics
until they grow bored and release me
back out the door I came in.
I’m chasing you along the winding melody,
right to the edge where you leap into flight
and I skid to a stop, knowing I would fall;
my voice is greyer in its prime than yours was
when you decided to quit
and take up painting.
Sighing over sweet, ancient memories,
the ocean combs out her wavy locks, carelessly
spilling them across the flaxen sand.
The untroubled sky writes her love-notes
on the feathers of seabirds, and she gives no reply
except a faint, shy caress at the horizon.
Even I of the most loquacious mind
sit watching in permeating silence;
there is a kind of clarity here
such as I have never found.
I seek comfort in both reason and faith: pattern observation
and prayers to make-believe ocean gods.
Love is just one brand of glue.
Routine, inertia, practicality:
the names of monsters in my closet.
I’ve learned this lesson before. I remember the theory
but not the application.
This poem has been taken down for submission to a publication. Apologies for the inconvenience.
