Fade until you are gone

I have decided;

tomorrow you will not exist

so bring tomorrow now

fade until you are gone

for you are not welcome

It’s easy to inherit words of hate

deride someone, tear them into tender shreds

morsels of taint blown out

It’s easy to throw bitterness and shade

until the lake consumes us both

I choose to stand between extremes

I neither hate you nor fear you

you repulse me

as I have been repulsed many times

by a look my gut says is false

and I say nothing, though I should

too late, not too late, I move on

thinking not of your attempted control

but of what stands after

when you are gone and nothing of my world

smells of your arrogance any more

when your belief that you know what I am thinking

has washed away with time

reducing you to a memory I

try to lose and find that I can

and the power you thought you had

has also receded, a dread vanquished

showing there was never anything

but an empty shoreline

and sea, going out, out, out

with you

running ever after it

tomorrow you will not exist

so bring tomorrow now

fade until you are gone

for you are not welcome

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Two opposite ends of the same breakage

I a child

asked her, an adult

what does it take? To be merciful?

How much effort? Will it hurt much? Why

doesn’t the whole world

try?

And she, an adult

fiddling with her rings, two on each finger,

because she had run out of places

to exhibit her finery, her sophistication,

she, thought of where she would go

when she left our run-down, poky house

and did not return for supper

and what she would do

when she wasn’t weighed down

with runny nosed children and yellowed aprons.

She, who has the mind of three bright men

and a heart that did not really hold space

for people who could not spell, or those who were

slow, ones who did not impress, their light not bright

but stuck in amber, she said naught,

for she liked fine things

over much

and that did not include

wellington boots and children’s well played with toys

dragged through muddy pathway, leading to small houses

where there is life, oh laughing, gainful life, but raw with

the knuckles of everyday, up to their elbows in greese

and the machinations of surviving.

I, a child

asked her, an adult

what does it take? To be merciful?

watching the baby bird, turn to bone and feather

beneath the great conker tree, its crimson roots

like great yawns beneath moss, reaching through

heavy clouds with the hands of imploring worship

and life

so harsh and unwilling, to include ‘fairness’

would steal away humanities belief in kind deeds with its

brutal parsing

which is why , my grandmother, sitting on our stoop, paring apples,

with a sharp knife inherited from her father

told me once

(and she could never spell, for she left

school early to work in poorly paid factories

only once managing to get through

The Communist Manifesto).

Child, we must be good, we must be kind.

For nothing else knows how to be, they simply

act upon their instinct to survive. Like

the lambing season, when a new lamb is

born and the mother dies, we turn our eyes

heavenward but there is no tenderness, only

the brutal knot of nature, felling her herd

till balance is restored. Our human hearts

with our aching over suffering, fit poorly

with the callous hand of nature, she must

cull with her sythe irrespective of who deservse,

there is no mercy as we know it, in this

whittling of life. Only those who survive

and those who do not, dying in bleached

bones by the thoroughfare of our journey.

I thought then of you, with your

fine clothes and your well trained mind

and empty rooms filled with piano playing ghosts

how you were

much like the nature I saw around me

beautiful, wild, out for your own gain,

surviving at any cost

and I

the strange flux of humanity and terror

seeking to be merciful

among the debris of our eternal battle

with light and dark.

I knew then, why you despised me

why I loved you

it is like the fable of the scorpion and the frog

it is your nature

to sink deep into the foaming earth

showing only your glacial tip

as it is mine

to seek mercy, in unyielding hearts,

two opposite ends of the same breakage.

If we always run from being stung, in Summertime

sometimes we miss out on dawn

thus we must permit

the risk to gain, a possible reward

high in silvering trees

where the sleepy bears

hide their honey.

December

The bells of the church rung

He said it’s why he didn’t turn back

That and blossom in the thimbling trees so early

He believed in signs and symbols, so did I

Before I was grown and knew the torn things inside

He was the boy who learned on me

I gave what I could, but kept two things to myself

My secret was, I wanted a child

My sin was, letting him take you back

Standing fighting at the top of his marble stairwell

Smelling of his mother’s perfume and congealed cough sweets

I saw myself falling, pinwheel, before he cast me down

The imprint of his reedy hands, a daisy chain around pale throat

His child in my swelling belly, with eyes the color of regret

He said it was an accident, I felt his hate as I lost my balance

Jabbing me in the back with whisper and sharp intention

Get it out, get it out, get it out

He didn’t know the truth of us, my child and I

She wore silver bells around her neck

And in his mother’s sea blue bathroom of mirrors

I stood watching the rapture of your being, take me over

And in the night, your father tried to tear you gone

With his thrusts into me like a spear and a blunt knife

Still my child you held on

Staring through my eyes at me when we were alone

I could hear everyone’s comments before they spoke

If you have that man’s baby, you’ll be shunned

And alone was really alone. Still I thought

I am not a warrior, but I would fight for you, daughter

Quickening in me like a secret slipstream of language

I felt our connection, you were more than blood and sinew

I watched my burgeoning figure, as I removed my clothes

Thin and narrow, except where you were taking form

Stepping into the bathwater, I felt something cry and give way

And the bath became blood

Hot water on, with the door closed and locked

Your father saw water running on the tiles in the hall

All pink and gorgeous

He broke the door down and saw me sleeping in gore

All pink and gorgeous

In the hospital they whispered words of relief

She’s so young, so petite, it was a mercy and a blessing

Any more blood and she wouldn’t have made it

They didn’t see your father’s fingerprints or where

He cut you out with the slow deliberation of an absent butcher

The whoosh and hiss of hospital machinery

The soft whisper of pretty nurses shoes sliding on lino

Your father watching over me, the violence still marked on his face

When we got home, the taxi driver said; take care you goofy kids

Your father dosed me with pain killers and turned his raging back

I saw the emploring milk leaching from my breasts for you to drink

And it was red

I felt the sting of your vanishing scraped dead from myself

My stomach still swelled with your ghostly outline

Your father moved in his wrath lain sleep and mounted me

I said; I’m hurt, it’s too soon, oh God!
But God refuses sinners and pearls

You were gone so you could not speak too

And your father dove into places raw, stitched and mourning

With his eyes closed he imagined nothing and saw nothing

With his fists closed he rose above me in darkness like a wraith

Not touching the spilt evidence of you

Not realizing he was slick with blood and tears bound in a girl

Till morning when he washed you off and with it, me

As I lay in the stained bed with my nightdress hitched around my wrung neck

Feeling the milk in my breasts, the wetness of your ever spending

Feeling the tether from you to me and back again neverending

Your father went on to conquer worlds with a rod

A rich man with the same long fingernails and sharp soul

He calls me once in a while

Tells me I’m still beautiful

And if I saw him, he would bring harm

So I keep us safe and I see no one

As we sit on the balcony and I imagine

You’d be tall and you’d be beautiful like climbing honeysuckle

Because you are my daughter

We raise our glasses to your December birthday and 27 years

And your father he cannot attend our moments together

He may hurt us again, he may seek to take you away

He stays in his apartment in the city and grows richer

On weekends he chooses whores that look like I did

When I was just a young girl

With hair down to my bottom and no breasts to speak of

He had me before I ever menstrated so we thought

You could not exist

It was true, you did not

Home from the hospital with a pad of loss between my legs

But that was a fall I can still feel in my displaced bones

Seeing the future with each tumble, seeing his fists open and close

Alone now and you have been dead 28 years almost

And I light a candle

For what I was not meant to have

Though I would have loved you so

And I do

You speak to me when I sit by myself and the night is quiet

You tell me not to be lonely though it is impossible

I smile at you because that’s what mothers do

Spare their children

Any pain

Save you

We are rarely touched enough, by far away concerns

Though we should

Give a damn

I was told it was their fault they went into the cave

Made me wonder

At the empathy quota

Of some

For last night

In the darkness

I imagined them in their dark cavern

No security

Just the absence of everything

As oxygen lost

And waters threatened to rise

I prayed

To God

To thimbles

To caves

To monsoons

To mercy

They did not die

It must not be in vain

Somehow

Save them

They live now

On the thin cusp of chance

I cannot tip the balance

Imagining their parents

The exhausting weight of time

Patience nobody has

Will they survive?

I try to think of ways

It reminds me

We are free

It reminds me

How little we think

Of others

Clinging on

When we get consumed by unimportant rages

If I could dive

And take your hand

I would hold my breath

Like Shelly Winters in The Posidon

She died saving them

I was about your age when I watched that film

I asked my dad

Why do good people suffer?

He said don’t worry

But I did

I wanted to forget

It’s easier

Her eyes kept coming back

Just as you

With your skinny legs drawn away from the edge

Tell me we only have one thing left of worth

Our hearts

So I pray

Whether I believe in God or not

For a miracle or a hero

To save you all

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2018/07/05/asia/thai-cave-diver-intl/index.html

Safe ascent

This unspoiled place

holds a silence and a sound both

in the careen of wild bird, dove-tailing against light

swish tailed-fox, caught in glimpsing treeline, scar of russet

your wool pulled and caught like thoughts on wire

I felt you inside, like mercury, descending to places I’d locked

tight against battering fists and claim

how did you learn the maze and possess

parts of me I had yet to give permission?

though all of us are like the wool, caught and fluttering

against a world of happen-chance and calamity

it is only perhaps, in those untethered moments

love, unexplained by all things

captures in unguarded step

drowning tightly held belief

we are our own master

and in this yield

in your arms and the void calling overhead

a vast sky holds swell of rain

just long enough

for our safe ascent

Fixed on open door

If you said today

Run away

I’d reply

I’m too old of heart for taking chances

And yet

If I could leave behind

These footprints of hell

I’d turn my bag inside out

Leave the clothes that made me and now don’t fit

They can hang on tree limbs for another girl

Who hankers after fushia and magnolia

If you can live without

A stomach

I’d set mine free

And empty as a cloud, run

In your direction toward the sea

Where salt spray would take the last

Residue of this awful time, turning back horror

Remind me of joy I once took as permanent

Clamboring through live oak, like fairy folk,

Rays of light like stars shine down from sky

Happy dogs, wet with run, tongues lolling, espie March rabbit

The thin stream between content and crestfallen

Just one turn of fate and all you cherished is gone

Reclaiming yourself somehow, among the fallen

How can you expect to thrive when pain halts every nuance?

A burden you do not know how to lift, for it

Wakes you every dawn with insisted sickening

And if you could, you’d disguard the parts that betray you

Run into the heartlands with nothing more than release

And the long legged stride of a creature unwilling

To be shared

For you are a child of this world and no harm is meant

To slow your step, as you cleave toward pilgrimage

One flat foot in front of the other

Setting prints in ochre mud for generations

Where they will ask, how did she keep trying?

Despite the steapness of the trail

And the lapse into despair, how did she

Keep her compass set?

If you said today

Run away

I’d reply

I’m too old of heart for taking chances

And yet …

One foot follows freedom even as the other

Chaffs against chain

It is in my nature, to seek the wild

Among nature, reclaim, loss of liberty

Trying to pin me to insect board

Dry up my dreams, pack away the urge

You haven’t claimed all of me

As long as a part stays

Fixed on open door

I will in time defeat this shackle

Turning into a bird

Threading my flight far

From your waning power.

If you said today

Run away

I’d reply

I’m too old of heart for taking chances

And yet

I want the girl who was just there a moment ago

Who stood on tip-toes and wore clothes twenty years too young

Who didn’t brush the back of her hair and ate with her mouth lolling

If it were a matter of wishing myself better, I’d sell it all and start over empty handed

Reclaim the lost self, in the strange soup of sickness that makes enemies of us

I want to wake up and be, a girl of air and sea and breath

I want to feel whole and no longer racked by hurt

Go forward in time and reclaim what is lost

make me well again, said the child, in the girl, in the woman.

Anger

The therapist

she doesn’t look her age, though it wouldn’t matter

she is wise in years and that’s what counts

her skin reminds me of a Swiss lady I knew, she has the color of travel

and I trust her which is all that is needed

she asks me, why I don’t get angry

I think about where my anger has gone

after all I was an angry child

only the other day a friend’s parent reminded me

‘you were a naughty little girl, but I know it was because you were mad’

it feels like she’s talking about someone else

because I have lost my ire

that’s not a good feeling

if I had it back, I imagine

I’d rage through the streets, decrying the bad deeds of an indifferent world

but I sit quietly reading a book and the clock is ticking down the hours I am not

angry

for anger …

can be a severance, a sword, a spike

and we know that

so we tuck it, tightly to sleep

there it lays, sometimes for decades

burning a hole in our placid smile

I know someone who is angry, and they

are a short rocket full of sparks, able to go off at slightest provocation

whilst I, am measured and sensible, like a bad calculation

it gets me nowhere

because I am hurt

deeply by the injustice of little and great things

whoever told me not to be angry, that I didn’t have a right, that it was selfish or

low-brow or just plain bad manners and SHAMEFUL

isn’t here now

and I am, stuck on the wheel of sickness where they like to say

‘isn’t she calm and well adjusted to her own personal brand of hell?’

I thought strength was not letting anger get the upper hand

but i’ve been in a war without any weapons

sometimes anger is better than turning inward or, staying still

it fuels the urge to live

it leaves bruises you remember

I am angry

behind this painted mask and ironed clothes

I am a raging angry woman, with still unbrushed parts

who wants to throw the phone when it rings, out of the window, deliberately breaking glass

I am fury and it is a desire of mine

to scream until my throat is sore and beseech the skies

I am quivering with rage and if I could, I would, throttle the fates

for there is anger inside and though it is buried deep

it has a voice and that voice says

why me? why me?

(Not meant self pityingly, rather, a hard truth.)

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

Unbreakable

The riot

Began on a quiet night

She slipped out of her skin

Swam in silver

Becoming a thing without need of heat or pulse

And blooming beneath the waves

Briefly recalled

The lost heartbeat and its mercurial wont

To fall in love, to feel and dance

Sweating and electric

Swaying like sea creature become used to land

The breathless longing and great pain

For if, you cast off your humanity

You may lose more than the disturbance of life

The very knocking against your chest

A thunder, a pain, a joy

That supplicate and clenched urge

Sometimes silently played out on the watchful flicker

Of hands casting over and over

Some semblance of longing, unbreakable

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