Cork and All

forsooth
flat tire hero
you roll me to zero
with pity, you find me
drunk
on crisis wine
denying its a sign

in the light
in the dark
a glowing mark
a franchise un-love-matched

crush me
like calcium
shell-lacked
cup
into fabulous plastic waste

squeeze out my taste

leave me withered and whence
you came, quiet and lame

surrendered the soul jar
cork and all—

***

For dVerse weekly Open Link Night…check them out!

Just What Am I Obsessing Over Right Now

This time last year, I was probably checking on more than 80 blogs a day. That’s the way I do stuff, I get toooootally obsessed and immersed, then drunkenly emerge from the obsession. Sometimes my husband has to kindly ask me to emerge a little early, if things got a BIT too intense. Sometimes he doesn’t know what the obsession is, but recognizes all the signs. OR at least I think he does. I’m not him. I just maybe wonder if he wouldn’t, sometimes I feel like my skin burns and blazes with the betrayal such obsessions amount to…

I’m reading Horns, by Joe Hill and I think it’s fucking me up. He is an incredible writer who only resembles his father, Stephen King, in the way that I CANT PUT THE BOOK DOWN.

So, big surprise, still obsessing over Mr. Alder’s lovely photos. I know I haven’t done the Buddha Rocks Project in a while, but its not due to a lack of new photos. That man is a machine. I just don’t have it in me. The flow of words is much slower lately. Sometimes the riverbed is exposed and bone dry.

DVerse Poetry is my only hold on the blogging community right now and I remain grateful that each week I can post, read and be read by such a diverse collection of poets and writers, including Orangeuapoet.

Libby has been writing her love/life story for a while now. Each post cuts and kisses.

Lastly, Steve Schultz. Otherwise known as Fractured Phrases. People? Rise up and demand he publish. He remains the only blog/blogs I read on a daily basis since forever. And his kids are so damn cute. He takes amazing photographs and isn’t afraid to be himself.

That’s all.  Because I will certainly not admit to playing Castleville rather than anything else right now. I am certainly not some geek, definitely not some Survivor-watching loser. I’m always being creative and mysterious and shit.

Love.

A Thing Forever

I don’t feel like this is over. Or I do, but how can I go forward? I can only go to the side. Big Daddy still owns me.

He still owns me. I still wear his mark, so proud and even when we parted; it never ached and felt out-of-place. It feels right still, and it means I am still his.

I know when he designed my mark, he made it deliberately innocuous. He made it to signify to ME ALONE that I was his, but to the world it could look like it meant something else. And to him, in his head, I think he thought it meant something else too. Like he had tricked me into doing it, he appeased me without trapping himself.

We are speaking again, but it’s not easy. The waves of love still wash over, pound and crash. Like in life, he, so far from this sea and me, by the shore feeling all the pain. 

I miss his words and his encouragement. I miss him saying my name and I itch like a junkie to call him by his.

His demeanor hasn’t changed. It’s still the same Big Daddy, but we don’t discuss sex. We don’t discuss love and our relationship because all it is now is an empty kill-the-time friendship.

I don’t feel safe discussing my needs, the men in my life, my husband. I can’t tell him of my hurt places. They all hide behind the one, the place where I hurt for him.

God, I miss him so much.

And if I am only to be owned by him, then I become unrequited. He does not want the job, does not want me as his possession.

The worst, very worst part is he does not feel my loss. Just because he is ok doesn’t mean he doesn’t miss me, that’s what he said as we stumbled towards separation. That’s what he said. But how can he be ok? How can he not miss my obedience, support, love, and dirty mouth, willingness to give, give, and give?

I would throw myself at his feet now. I do not think there is anyone else. I want to beg and plead. I want to weep and scream. I want to kick and demand. I can HARDLY hold my tongue, please Big Daddy…

I am marked now. And despite all his attempts to protect me from permanence, he hasn’t.

Surprisingly, I’m not sad all the time. I have the Builder, who is so much more than Big Daddy ever was with his loving phone calls, emails, twitter. He is ever-present and so supportive and I have managed to not fall in love with him. But he isn’t dominant. There is no ownership. I can’t call him Daddy. It would feel wrong and inviolate to do so…

But my master is a Daddy. That’s the name I need to speak, that’s the love I need. Big Daddy had this love so easily flowing out of him, like 2nd nature. But no cell phone, no alone time, not even computer most of the time. He liked his limits, they protected him.

Or he never loved me.

How can I consider that a truth? But how else could he have cut me loose, carved me out, cut his losses? A simple quick swipe for him, and that connection was gone. For me, it has become a permanent binding, thick as the wrist that bears his mark, throbbing with vitality, pulsing with a life-long need for him. I have been waiting since birth for him. HE IS THE ONE.

I would still go back to him…

He just has to utter my name…

Lighter

Sometimes
most times
isn’t it about
falling
no
jumping without a net
below you
believe enough
in yourself
to jump
without a net
below you
I believe
in my strength to land
safe or
crash well
or pick myself up
or
fly.

City of Sin

Delicate
Fish fry afternoon
45 minute walk on inferno cement
to polluted ocean
on flush town border

remember when it was just me and you
tripping on Jules coffee
in our ghetto love nest
with our oven-ette
and three cats?
 
Diamond district house paint fume war
Feet slap uneven sidewalk
Storefront ghosts,
like old tyme moth ball ladies
holding bedraggled
parasols against the aging sun

save 3 dollars for ice cream sandwiches
and debate the bus ride back to
the center of the lost land
minorities and poverties
in walmart flip-flops and expensive
cars parked in front of
matchbox apartments
 
carved from mansions of founding sea fathers
when the ocean was king
not the city
the ocean was king
fishing was king of money
and diamonds were bought with the blood of boats
sweat is also salty
 
leaving the cast offs now to reclaim
the elemental home as their own
 
we smelled the ocean every single day,
then the garbage, then the cooking oil
and back in out bed/couch with our bowl/solace
I’d make you dinner and
we’d swear there was nothing
better than two rooms of
our own and freedom
near the ocean.

Will Rise and Fall

Be volant, wings above all things,
the angst and sorry patchwork pieces
squares away where verdure grassland
borders in the past had touched, blades
intertwined there annuals grown to
bewail don’t forget don’t forget, it
wasn’t the right, parting like lips, imagined
hope perhaps too much to miss, too much
it would be an itch under skin till
fingertips would be back with
measured words and new plans and
new rules that would move forward
but be volant as good as pretending,
all a’glide, never a’fly, each thing was
felt with that part of so hard to see
how that could be, but believe an idol builder
crashing to our ripe land, soon fallow and
out of rotation yet receptive of a melted
wing beauty who cannot help but be volant
there are wings, above all things.

I Don’t Ignore Miracles

Life will grow on a pile of overturned rubble…

It’s so hot and I don’t feel well.

I am riding home on the train and the asshole next to me can’t even tuck his elbows in, like the rest of us.

And we are going thru the air, under the highway, way beneath the Zakim, below 93, parallel to Boston Sand and Gravel and the train yard, rows and rows of tracks, still carrying flat cars and open container cars with uniform piles of sand…

I don’t get what I am doing in life. There it is, those worthless doubting feelings, of my sickness. So pointless. Just life. Just live it and breath.  My kids, right, my kids. Focus on my kids. If I focus on the positive things in my life, my writing, my family, my husband, my kids…

The Hood Milk factory, then the tunnels and stone walls around Sullivan Station, positively covered with graffiti, some I look at for ten years or more. Then these open fields that have changed over the years, developing into a new train stop and more stores…

And I am thinking about what a shitty mom I am. How I don’t give them everything other parents do. I can think of good things I give, but so many more things I can’t. Or don’t.

Then this empty field with piles of dirt and smoothed paths and graded paths and paved paths…

And the piles of dirt have shy grasses growing in carpets everywhere, up and over bulldozer made mountains of get-outta-the-way and progress.

And don’t you see? IT finds a way.

I’m going to do my best. They are made of fine stuff. Of STRONG stuff.

Life will grow on a pile of overturned rubble…

Old Man

Did I try hard enough? Should I have tried harder to be his friend and that alone? GOD, I miss him. And in places and ways I have no right to. Not just during the times we would be together, but at home. Playing with the kids, thinking he might get a kick out of something, or my photographer’s eye, only there because of him, overactive, trying to please him.

I wonder if it’s true, that all I can do is be a little girl to his old man. I should be able to be his friend and that alone, but I don’t want to. I want to be his, his property. I want a daddy, one that loves me unconditionally and guides me. One I feel comfortable going to, one I am close to, one who makes it so clear that they are proud of me.

Am I mistaking fate with that desire? And if so, how hugely unfair to him…

I miss him.

Steady As Water

I hope he is ok. His routine, left unfulfilled yesterday, for all the world to see. This man, steady as water, as true as sky and tree. That I could upset this flow…I only beg I didn’t hold him too long. I sigh for the love we were allotted, as a gift well received for the work we did to get it.

I hope he is ok. I shouldn’t look, but I did. And will I continue to? I probably will.

I am writing more. Why do I feel like these are letters from somewhere small, where I have gone to heal? No, that’s not right. It’s a place I’ve gone to transform once again. I have to. I have to keep writing and living and raising my girls. I have to be married to my best friend and cultivate my family, because that’s the most important thing. It really is.

That’s What You Taught Me

Endless pictures
exist
that’s what you taught me
just like
mostly happily ever after.

The strength to do
bubbled up inside me.
No longer question
being worth it.
That’s what you taught me.
That’s what you taught me.

But worth you staying despite
your gentleman’s need
to always do the right thing.

There is no half way.
No uncertain.
That’s what you taught me.
No violation of loyalty.

Imperfections will be admitted.
Worries will be submitted.
Risks will be calculated and taken,
chalkboard numbers kept inside.

And while yes,
endless pictures exist,
yes, they do,
that’s what you taught me,
endless lives to live don’t.

The strong hurt.
The distant grow close.
The traditional emote.
The macho ache.
The older express.
The calm lash out.
That’s what you taught me.

Pride.
Love.
Safety.
Adoration.
Normalcy.
Patience, oh so much patience.
Hope.

Hope.
That’s what you taught me.