Second chance

Not if, WHEN I am well, I will not squander, but should not have needed, a second chance

It will be / It already is / a spiked and harpooned, learning curve

There is humiliation, in not being insightful enough

That it took, being brought to kneel, flayed by horrors, to be grateful enough and find strength

As only when / it’s almost too late / we plead and beg / for one more chance

It is the truer person, who needs no such prompt, but lives rightly, first time around

I am declaring reincarnation and broken-handed, putting myself back together, limb by limb, until even I, do not recognize, the survivor within

She has sore knees from beseeching and a box of unwound screams for keeping

Maybe together, we can shift the albatross, tie on our ice skates, and, leaving bearly visible lines, skate the circumference, to where we last left ourselves, before water absorbed and we sunk, full of the weight of years, undone

Long ago and just now, these worthiest goals lay fallow, ink blots of punctuate

For the urge to live fully, is always most powerful, when denied.

Then, it is up to you, said the rise of each, urgent day

To scatter yourself in those lined troughs, awaiting divine chemistry

To grow once more, whole, when the door is opened and light let in, again

I pray for all, who yearn to begin

One way you can see, throw a penny in a pond, watch ripples cast divination

Fortune can be such a fickle playmate, the one who steals your efforts from your plate or, coin shall surface, catching sunlight, glint, at days ahead, not so dim

And while you wait inside your bird cage, the journey of even those imprisoned, can rise, from the depths of status quo

The lost and lingering who have forgotten how, to float on water

It is in horror, we see truth

Before

is a color I cannot describe

a place I don’t fit into anymore.

 

Even if I am restored

things will be changed for good

for most of us there are times

that shape our marrow

could be in the form of torment

maybe sorrow, sometimes joy

often the hardest times leave deepest imprint

perhaps it shouldn’t be that way

we should rejoice our luck a little, usually too busy enjoying ourselves

to leave permanent mark or maybe, challenge speaks louder than mirth

it is easy to accept a good day like a hot bath

than deal with a bad and hollow foe

that’s when our quick is sharpened,the story of our lives written

on the tip-toe of endurance

and what if we do not want to endure?

too bad, shit happens, legs break, minds crack

we’re going to end up there at some point

better waterproof our leaking sides best we can

the ocean isn’t a forgiving mistress.

 

When I fell, my mouth filled with salt

even then I didn’t know how far torment, reached down

it was a well, beneath the sea

a second drowning

for those who long to be free above ground

shackles of the merciless kind

only then I wondered at the strength of others

enduring from such an early age whilst I

ran long in the garden, unawares, chasing butterflies without a care

thinking I knew real pain from a momentary hurt

I knew so little

just a moment ago and a life time apart.

 

I am a twin of my previous self

we stand on different sides of the same coin

I am submerged, she is still, basking in the glow of a harvest moon

sometimes I look over at her and feel such envy

anger for my lack of appreciation when I, was her

but you cannot lead a horse to water

you cannot teach a child what she must learn

getting stung on the principle, she discovers through pain

it wasn’t in my thoughts that I should be

the girl on the other side of the echo, pleading to return

I don’t know if I will be permitted

but should I ever, walk again without curse

it won’t be as the same person, but a mixture of two

once you’ve seen yourself and begged for mercy

everything alters and everything stays the same

it’s up to you to be mindful of what you learned in that maze of pain

I learned what we think of as hardship

is often just everyday life

what we believe is suffering

can be comfort compared to other lives

when we don’t think we can change

then we aren’t given a chance, we know we should have

it is in diminishment we find elucidation

it is in horror we see truth.

 

Let me back inside my life again

and I will not be the girl who, took the easy road

for she now knows, just how deep anguish can go

it is in the tangle of the briar

and the wormwood of old trees

whispering advice never heeded

by the youth who believe themselves free.

 

Before

is a color I cannot describe

a place I don’t fit into anymore

 

 

That buoyant world

You are afraid to shut the front door

it is an unblinking eye to the living

you are attached to a virus, like a fly

stuck firm in ointment, will

be claimed slow and sure

by its urge to escape, it shall

sink deeper and knowing this, you

refuse to close away the day, but

by standing against urging cold air

feeling labored breath of all those

who maintain and climb their days into years

by the touch of their effort, and the rise and fall

of that buoyant world

you shall rejoin the wheel as it arcs and spins

counting down our mortal pieces

such as we are, labored by knowing

how fragile the shimmer of life

yet, not yet, yet

we are still

afloat

Guilt

Guilt

Is a rare bird of shame

Its plumage

Breathtaking

For guilt

Captures the beholder, willing or not

Averting gaze from all else

Guilt will render paradise dowdy

Comparing freedom with the chains of its capture

Guilt is an old, fond bruise

Reminder of moments left torn to shreds

It will piece them carefully back

Twice as convincing, twice the weight

Strung round your neck like noose of sea pearls

Begging to be drowned

Guilt is a rose bush with bleeding thorns

A shudder as you catch yourself thinking of

Those pursed secrets you’ll never disclose, even to yourself

Snapshots you expunge, that still, listlessly, rise from the depths

Never speak of it, even to the merry faced doctors 

Plunging their needles as far as they’ll go

Guilt

Makes you sick

Wan faced, old before your time 

Aloof in the varnished secret

Guilt

Steals your liberty 

But like a lie

Guilt is not vanquished, even by truth

There are things better never admitted

Keep them so deep inside you start believing the deception

Until

Like a wide eyed bride

Guilt takes your hand 

And plunges you back where you’ve been all along

There’s no solution to shame when it’s too late to undo

The poison that you drink, the person you’ve turned into

Guarding yourself like a wreck against sharp rocks

With less and less by the day to salvage

If you spoke it out loud

Surely the very sky would catch fire

How many of us must carry a spark?

Burning in our secret hearts?

And maybe this is why

You never know another person by what they share

Instead

It is the unsaid

Electric in the air

We recognize in others

The tarnish of shame

As clear as promises once given

Cannot be refunded

Tell me then

It’s not all about me.

We look up at the sky, wondering who is looking down.

It’s not all about me.

As we age, moments catch us like snags on

favorite cardigans

mended but never the same

too good for charity, too flawed to sell

value in sentiment and what was once

at first glance, flawless

as if such a thing matters after a while

too late we see this

after years of staring into mirrors thinking

if I were just a little prettier they would … love me, desire me, need me

it’s not all about me

or the holes we mend, attempting to recreate

but you find that out after many errors and so

is it any wonder the old will smile wistfully and proclaim

youth is wasted on the young

just as bras that are uncomfortable

are the domain of insecure girls like I was

clinging to images and totems

rather than digging my heels in and

staring upward at the sky

heavy with impending storm

so we left our youth like a shed skin

and not knowing of this wasteland stumbled

catching glimpses of who we were before

fear made us raw

the taste of elements on your tongue

every superstition a reminder

what you don’t know can harm

and then

letting go because the weight is

crushing you into absorbing mud

drying your scream

wondering

what did my ancestors feel? As they walked

witness to the stillness of night and

the unseen murmur of what could and is not

like a giant ships knot

impossible to pick

halts momentum

I stood like an ice princess

poised to act

and turned to fat

turned inside out and back

like a flipping cat will somersault maybe eight times

landing on his feet

my soles are sore

with the burden of myself

all those unlicked envelopes containing

individual tethers to places in time

experiences, terrors, lessons

and the well-worn knees of an ardent repenter

who throws down their sin

and still it sticks to him for one and the same

we become, with our habits and our movement

gliding through the years like ivory comb

will stick in tangled hair and pull

some loose

I dangle

from a mountain of my own making

all the aches, those childish glimmers

reflecting across the lake like

long fingers will create sound

we move to instinctively

tell me then

how to absolve myself of the penchant

for avoiding hard things

tell me then

how we live, in still life, arranged on a table

like hot watermelon, freshly sliced, drips its

sticky insides

tell me then

the exact mixture to eliminate that

terrible awareness you have

mastered easy ways out

only to find yourself

grown over with maze

tell me then

is it too late

when the hour strikes

and your reflection is almost unrecognized

to return and begin again

that clear, straight path

you once believed yourself on

before you lost courage

AGAIN

Sadness should never be more familiar than peace

Yet some days it is as if

Snow felted the house with only one emotion

And try as you might, the loneliness of your life envelopes

I have never found a remedy for that blue note

Striving to exorcise an unsettled icing of grief

Telling myself this too will pass

Somehow strikes false

For isolation

Looking out at the great cleave of land

Stretching as far as the eye can make out

One can say does not have to be sad

Yet if the majority of days you wake in silence

Wondering how you missed the full house

What happened to cast your dice alone?

Where from your earliest memory you shared space with emptiness

You may look at others with full lives and wonder how 

But it is a language you never learned

The discipline of togetherness or choice to be apart

Decisions made almost before birth

I carry the blood of reluctant loners

Speak the language of the professionally peripheral

None of us learned the art of heaving dinner tables or celebration

We learned to be alone from before we had known

I tried to break the Fates

Only ending further away

Now I live in a country without kin

A city without familiars

I can see myself, each year a little older 

More pinched than before, a flower dried and pressed

Flattened in her self capture

I want, I long, I desire so much 

To be known, to be among

Yet I end back here behind glass, an exhibit of one

Lost for fix, it seems, fate has her fun 

Childless, empied of possibility I feel like everything came undone

And I rolled like tumbleweed

And I gathered speed

Afraid of my life like 

Being made aware you were mad all along and everything you believed and clung on to

Was false

It is hard to be okay many times

That cold fear claims me, whispers, you are alone

The child within quakes to believe

She is still afraid of monsters

But the adult 

She no longer feels that is the worst outcome

For her, the idea of being alone

The last one

And no one notices those who are invisible

Yet still they live

As empty as a corn field

After they burn away the last dried husks 

A scorched Earth, flat and still

Enduring the ache 

Once, twice and again

Skate

Sickness is my latest Paramore

She is more attentive

Less fickle

She sticks like late season honey to the insides of my fever dream

A purple moth with nectarine probiscis

She hears my chest rise and fall

Like carefully tilted chess pieces

Will release balance and find

Greater purchase in uneven defeat

Yet

I remain undefeated

As if by whim

A last horrah

Like a Rosy cheeked girl with retrouse buttocks

Tips her mirth at the crowd

Who in unisen rise 

Fat, thin, butter fingered and pianist

To cheer her abandon

As I turn my hot cheeks your way

Facing one another in the skeleton of dawn

I see your need of me

So insate and thundering

And though selfish mayhaps

I entreat

Pick another

I spent much time unraveling

Yet I remain

Stubborn and glassy eyed

A drunk patient of witchery

Somebody without many pockets

Containing Combs and honey

Yet my lips are sweetened by the shape

So simple and elongated

Of one more turn

On this thin ice

I bring

Few coins and less 

Courage than a child

But if you release me

I will have 

Remembered yet …

How to skate

You got out

(Part of a new series of poems about people whom I have met, who profoundly moved me).

They said

no it’s not a person, it’s a trash bag, or wad of clothing

as I turned the car around

knowing it was a girl, curled into herself

it was for her, the end of a long night

for me, an early morning drive

into rising sun

indigo girl

her limbs thin enough, to resemble twigs

hair colored black, face still-water of a child

she waved us off

no, no, no, I’m fine here

in the fetal position, on the cement

lying by the side of road exhaust

as predator number 10, idles his car and asks

do you want me to take you home

baby?

I press myself to the window glass

no, don’t get in the car!

he looks angry when she says

I’m just taking a nap, goodnight

his lust drives off, leaving fuel staining like road kill

I wonder

what he would have done if

all 90 pounds of her, in tiny shorts and torn top

had accepted his bearly, concealed hunger

how many predators comb

early morning side walks, hoping

to pick up lost girls?

she’s got sense and she also, doesn’t know

but I do

I was her once

crawling out of an abandoned warehouse

knife wounds, waltzing on my throat

cold semen in my belly

clawmarks designating, my survival

bearly

the car that stopped then

a light in darkness

they took me away, from near death

when so easily

I could have been picked up, a second time

a third,

by hands with bad intention

when you are fallen

people often crowd in, to help you

fall again

like wolves who smell

the coming of blood and

vulnerabilities, we think we hide

I told her

don’t get into a car with a lone man, or group of men

they may not show their fangs but

you are a little piece of goodness

sometimes people who prowl, want to hurt

that shining within you

we drove

she was looking out the window

with her unslept eyes and the residue of last night

still high on her pain

and for the first time in my life

I no longer felt a victim

but one of the imaginary horses, I used to ride

speeding away from slick, sales-man, cough

of curb-side prowler

I wanted to make her better

but sometimes you can only

patch and release

to maybe nothing safer than hope

with a few words

wishing, that when she’s sober

waking without assault

she remembers

you were her once

and you got out

 

The growing chronicles #4 Undone

Ageing backward

once a child

stuffed with potential

you could be burned and

engage future with the severed fearlessness of the young

who do not believe the bell will toll for them

and come a day

marked by tree rings of frigid growth

looking up at sky emptied of cloud

how cruel the season burns

secrets from the branches

 

that day

an altered girl sinks beneath bath water

marred by her loathing self

what emerges trembled in fear

keep the lights on mama

she is returning to unknowing

It is the dementia of the soul

clamoring for relief

 

her bones are no longer soft and green

they grow lean and she curls

away from herself

those days of succor and wiggle

when was the last time you touched her like a flower?

and opening she cried into you

tumbling into a shared well of blossom

 

we both wear silver in our hair now

released from knowledge, return to unknown

lying like a split pomegranate

seeds spilling out

mouths stained radiant

how did you live so long to trap yourself?

back in the box of musk and gunpowder

the lock sounds like a scythe

it is cold and unworn

opposing sides climb to the rumor

you are undone

The growing chronicles #3 Hypochondria

It’s still a man’s world

a world where most of the earth

would stone two women in love

and those women who break the glass ceiling are often

unrecognizable as women

for they eat

with their bean soup

the dry wafer of other females
If I tell you

I am not prideful

it is the quiet and the book

an occasion of solitude

interspersed with longing

I’ll never be a loud mouthed girl to hang your spurs upon

but still I know how to talk to the moon

and I believe in you
At night

poorly lit by lamps

like yellow faces downcast

we walk vigorously

hand folded in hand

and that simple act

I cherish

above any gift or benediction
When we are apart

monsters live under my bed

shadows rinse in continuing pass

the joy of breaking bread

shatters

as bloodied

the unseen art of war

within gentle hearts

causes my pulse to spike

and in time succumb

to hypochondria

 

For it is you

who taught me first

this is how you wade in shallow water

not listening to the buzz of insects

searching for a way in

and this is how you swim in deep water

not minding the curdled heat reflecting in

masks off the surface of thought

you can if you really want

stand solid against the onslaught of fear

crawling beneath your skin as the sun

grinds us down into withered and parched semblance

you can if you really want

defy time and tendency and take a deep breath

learning to stretch far in the distance

without air

 

When I wake

and the thunder of your absence

breaks my resolve

when the smell of you is fading

in the comb of your absence

I hear your voice skimming water

like touchstones seeking entry

one by one you build your fortress

installing me against the ravage

that pit I carried every year

before you walked into my life and said

fear cannot win as long as you believe in love