Peripheral

Marlene wasn’t concerned with any one but me.
She always preached to the back wall of the room,
switching her gaze from the windows to the tops of our heads.
But she was an excellent speaker.

And she started to solve all of our problems.

This was the fourth time Jeffery had been here,
he is very over weight
and his tiny sickly wife hasn't engaged in any form
of sexual activity with him
in over ten years.
He cries all the time.

Charlene’s daughter was murdered.
There’s something not alright in her head,
they think, sometimes I think, sometimes she does.
They are trying.
She wants to move away from her negligent husband.

Terry listens to the goals we set.
Terry gets upset when
my mental self esteem
becomes visible on the outside.

Terry has white hair, Marlene is tougher.
Marlene is a hardcore recovering alcoholic;
25 years sober.

Missy is very pretty.
When you stare at the sun and close your eyes;
you’ll see the color of her thick curly hair.
She’s heavy, on crutches (due to her amputated leg),
has two little kids, an affair, a husband in the military,
and a suicide attempt.
She’s incredibly kind.

Molly is nineteen and her mother died last August of cancer.
They were very close. She has two older sisters. She has brown hair, brown eyes and a round face. She drank too much after the death. Whenever she talks
she says “situational.” She has really bad panic attacks
that scare some of us. She’s always had them and some kind of depression, cutting and such. She’s very caring. And she’s very oblivious.

Rhonda is frail, bony, thin, toad like.
She speaks softly. She smokes.
She quit drinking,
she kicked her husband out of the house
and bought his bus ticket to California.
He’s still a drunk.
She doesn’t have any lips
and her hair is thin, short and caramel grey.

Robert has a deep, resounding african american voice.
He’s horribly depressed, but still somehow demands your
respect with his presence.
He has five children, he has been a good father,
they are grown and love him.
He has depression. He’s in a lot of pain.

And we just kind of come and go based on insurance companies.

Aftermath

I am unsure
Everything has changed.
If you question my response to the current,
So do I.

Is this transition, or is it the aftermath?

I follow;
a fact I have been disregarding for years.

I attempt

but I don't know how hard I try.

I listen to a silent heart break.

I hear things

but I can't recognize them.

Regardless of my desperate search
for a truth in love,

I have my family, whom I take for granted. They are love, surely.

But how many people is enough?
How many loves is enough?
How many different kinds of love are enough?

And why are there variations?

Oh I don't know,
and if everyone in this selfish 'generation'

claims

their own
then we have some new, refreshing , terrifying breakthrough.

The First Summer

It’s hard.

Yes, I know,
Thank you
Sir.

Anyone else outside of ourselves
climb and wind
up smooth stone
magically

reaching another platform.

No solidity.

I was brushing into
"in love"
Again.

But aren’t we all
just a little silly.

Having our glitches, our obsessions,
our failures and our families.

I can only speak for myself,
In this time
especially.

We communicate,
but we all misinterpret.

Perhaps thats love,
an end to miscommunication.

Oh I have no idea.

I would have called it defeat
in months before,
in years;

the absence of understanding.

I’m beginning to lean,
without belief or intuition or logic,

tipping into an explanation
that has no explanation.

Nightmares

I’m too serious of a lier

to be taken seriously.

I don’t understand,

and that’s a confession.

My ideas are almost

almost always

about love.

Burn your tongue,

you don’t even know what that means.

Child, she wishes under her breath

to a portrait.

She sees someone unfamiliar;

A catapulted story

sent over a bridge that’s

loosing it’s sacred foundations.

I dream about burnt nun’s

resulted from a war.

I am identifying bodies.

They are all so small

and still dressed in ashy nightgowns.

The smell is repulsive.

And the sight is

honest;

In all it’s disgusting truth.

Stages

I have no idea if I will be blamed for this.

My mother died last August, two weeks before my 19th birthday.

Does that have anything to do with it, nothing at all,

Or does that hold everything.

I have become

I don’t want to discuss that.

I don’t write often enough anymore.

I have nothing to write about.

They would disagree.

How could a community, a You, have a response to these

personal statements.

Is it weak writing?

What is weakness?

Is it breaking up with your girlfriend

or boyfriend or lying to your parents,

who you love or is it failing at your dreams

or is it not getting

just what you expected, what you craved.

Craving, desire,

tell me it is not selfish, tell me it is survival.

I am as confused as I have ever been,

trapped in a very short spiral

that ends in

Unfinished thought

I can’t get over the lies

they run now

in my river as salmon,

against my natural stream.

But I’m just a river lying to the ocean.

And I will come clean with salt ridden wounds

eventually.

Not today.

Today I sell bouquets on the curb,

presenting blue, red, lavender, pink

in plastic buckets.

I count, I choose, I pick, I occasionally

dare to be indifferent.

But they sit.

Please buy.

The cost is still in question.

What are they worth?

What are you worth?

The sun is behaving

behind clouds,

I take a seat on

an overturned bucket.

Suddenly realizing

these silly plants I have for sale

are my soul.

Are in my veins and my arteries,

pumping vital green juice back to my

contradiction heart.

I tell my customers

Drink them, drown in them or simply say

“No Thank you, Miss.”

I will always ask why

but the passer

will only wonder

what kind of saleswoman asks so many damn questions.

At this point, I often step away,

allowing for theft.

Just to leave them,myself, unattended.

I'm going to miss the trees that don't have leaves.

To write freely

of course

without shame.

6 o’clock in march.

growing wings...

dropping bombs...

accepting defeat...

realizing there is no such thing.

Risk. Fear. Risk. Fear.

Black against grey

or was it black against white.

Against, that is ridiculous.

Clarity, void of battle and petty games,

that love stems and

lasts

for a moonlight.

But by noon I just

taste a memory.

And when was memory

anything more or less

than imagination.

This must be where trust

becomes the truth.

Or fails.

wishing stones

I can feel my body

throwing sparkly stones

into blue wavy water.

I bend at the waist

and place my hands around

a daydream, heave that rock

into the waves. 

I was longing first, I'm sure,

and I'll be longing last.

I was the one who walked

down a sidewalk

convinced it had turned into

a yellow brick road.

Could you please remain,

despite my foolish collection

of wishing stones,

piled high and towering over us both.

It was my fault.

My skin may change from red to blue to black

and back again,

but promise you won't notice

these phases.

Cling to your ideal

and wield it into a kind of love.

You would tell me to stop it,

but it's in my nature to keep going.

It's quiet here, on a simple shore

where I am keeping company

with silent horizons 

and the rocks in my hands.

I would walk into the water

and let them weigh me down,

finally sinking to a floor

where the only friends

I would find are dreams I tossed.

Nothing but hope separates them

from the surrounding stone.

It's not lonely here, but I miss you.

I'm letting my ankles get wet and muddy.

And I'm trying to throw all those 

idilic plots and plans

back into the sea.

It's hard to both wish when you throw

and let go when the stone disappears.

I'm watching them splash and sink.

Hard as it may be to watch them drown,

I know it's either them or us.

Clothing

She doesn’t know what happened,

He was here one second

now he’s

Orange, highlighter pink

down his arms, across his chest.

Child,

she yells.

Boy,

she screams.

To understand her proportion

to his relative sadness

she swallowed a potion.

And he decided

while she was guzzling

liquid, that none of it mattered.

How could she compete with indifference?

She wondered what it would take.

She couldn’t handle

this new improved

kind of deception.

He chokes

so she swallows for him too.

She couldn't make it up

and take in his half

at the same time.

She couldn't dance

to things he wouldn't play.

She couldn't

and that was enough.

So she placed the glass

on the granite counter,

and dressed herself.

Weight

Dethrone yourself

pick up your wooden arms,

let your wrists snap like twigs

and take it off.

Dethrone yourself.

Let your fingernails

scratch at golden paint

you rubbed under your florescent eyes.

Let yourself become unwanted, unneeded.

Dethrone yourself.

Remove the responsibility of respect.

Take that heavy set off your head,

dethrone yourself.

It will be lighter.

Castles

I anticipate

bright red eyes

in the black

but they don’t come

unless seduced. Cautiously taunted.

I watch them arrive

like servants. And their support

makes me an unfortunate queen

whose own power

is stolen by some reflection

in the nighttime

that can barely be seen.

She wraps herself in a paper crown

then metal, then silver, then gold.

She removes them all

and bows to the sun.

No competition between jewels

and light.

Defeat rings

and this is what it

She will say,

stuck in her tower,

of her own making,

let me down

let me down

and perhaps

we can climb through that thistle and thorn

You a modest king

and myself, simply a maid.

A Study

I pace back and forth.

This doesn't belong to her anymore,

all of her things stopped

belonging to her.

Is that what it means?

When she curled up on the hospice bed

and decided enough.

Things stopped belonging to her. 

So I sit on the sofa she read the paper on

and I take naps

in her bed

with her pillows

that don't belong to her anymore.

How not to make death a cliche?

It happens all the time.

In calculating this constant loss the world suffers

I decided it meant a few things,

your body goes useless and with it all your senses,

and your things become some else's.

That's all thats been collected

as clear cutting fact.

Where do we go?

And when will everyone realize

that we have to leave? We have to change.

It's the burden I notice now above all else,

stuck with my senses and frustrated at

my frustration with them.

I want to praise my eyes and my fingers

for there work

but with such inevitable losses

how do we keep from cursing what keeps us here.

It may sound pessimistic

but we have heard 

we are all dying, since yesterday and the day before.

I only wish it made every moment precious

instead I find even my love stagnant,

waiting

when there is so little time. 

So I pace forth

under life and love,

the impatience screams. 

Taking a calm breath will

not crete grace,

not when 

you are carrying

a loss that makes your shoulders weigh uneven

with gratefulness

and absolute despair. 

Such imbalance, and contradiction. It touches everything.

After studying death

I have no conclusion. 

milwaukee parks

She is a tree branch in the night

hanging with the stars

afraid to become fluorescent.

She cowers

against her trunk

but she is no coward;

every moment

her reach extends

and what she finds, past the centimeter of despair

is simply

beauty.

She grows on, steady.

Beauty, more.

And now she is glowing,

black against blue,
light had changed color.

And she is.

belonging

She said I miss you. He said be quiet.

So she was.

And then

They didn’t mean to draw lines.

He tiptoed on it like a draw bridge

despite her

exhausted swear,

This was a solid structure.

It was the line she twisted around her waist,

and it’s tight pull was a comfort

learned.

Beauty in it’s immobile strength.

She was nothing more than a root.

And he walked precariously on her.

His leafy tendencies,

to fall and sway, to quiver and stay calm would explain

his turning green and orange and brown again and again.

As she lay stuck in the ground,

surrounded in meaningful dirt,

her extended branches feel his potential.

Spring will come but he will find

Some form of removal,

an excuse on justified repeat.

“But this is a tree!” she would scream,

She craved a line they could climb; she was

heaving them up and wrapping his palms around bare winter branches.

Tie a line to her and they may swing into a river come summer.

She grabs her waist, retracing a bone, her bark.

When the wind picks up, her rooted body

will remain.

But she knew seasons;

When the wind begins

his leaves will drop.

She owns nothing but what grows,

and as he falls to grass

she realizes the impermanence of

natural belonging.

I tried in too many ways

which crossed over one another as unsuccessful freeways,

leaving the cars

we didn’t know how to control

wrapped and ruined

around a telephone pole.

That was the end of phone conversations.

People die, after all, in several ways.

And I've managed to witness them.

I intended to be graceful,

with loss, with love

but look at me

wrapped thoroughly

around anything I can imagine.

Bent and jutting.

This is not grace.

Finality

I draw a blank now

with nothing to say

most often.

I told you I wonder.

We said a lot of

with charm

and coincidences.

None of that.

I might

not recall

the way I recall you

but in order

I remind myself

you were

young.

And I will know

that I barely knew how young I was, now.

Is everything still valid,

or was it written in chalk

somewhere we did not intend rain.

A situation.

As I watched myself

sit down to you

or stand against him

or lay beside another one,

I came to a

compromise with my nature;

If you were asking me to leave

then I was going away.

If our heads collided

in a different place

it would still only be a collision.

It wasn’t too important I see;

I just saw it pass

a little later than you.

That situation.

(beginning of a short story..)

At the corner

on the end of the block

there is a large white house.

We took our belongings

and placed them inside.

We put the bedroom furniture

in the living room

so none of us would ever sleep alone.

We made the kitchen into a greenhouse

and the closets into personal spaces.

We lost most of our things

in rough natural disasters

but we had windows

and extra beds

so everything was alright enough.

We moved here two years

after the really big fight.

I thought we might each find

someone else

But we ended by staying

in this big house together.

Our previous disagreements

seemed rather insignificant

in the very bad weather.

We all had to come inside and dry off.

And it was reason enough

to let the past out into an open backyard.

It took two years

but we decided it was best

to live together again.

the forest

She chased them into the corner,

growing wheat hid her lower legs

which were barefoot

and on tiptoe, ready to move.

Between a hard corner

of wooden fence,

she had them trapped.

The wild things were ravenous.

They growled for her,

to enable, to consent.

Glared with seductive eyes.

Behind this pasture,

surrounding

the farmhouse,

lining the fences,

were woods.

Thick and unpredictable.

This was the view.

These wild things

did not come from the view.

They came from her posture

and her imagination.

They were real.

And right now

she has them tense.

Her hair is down and

messy from the recent exploration.

She had fallen into a forest that

may have been forbidden.

The little cuts, the bruised knees

and sore body

had her curious.

She had found a river. She did not swim

but she took her clothes off and

let the water rise to her shoulders.

The newly stumbled into water

had redefined longing.

She leaves the home

when she pleases now.

But the woods are vaguely familiar,

she has been sleep walking in and out of them for years.

Perhaps awake

Whenever she leaves,

she has to come back.

She has to lighten her belongings

to walk farther out.

She also has to trick, tease, scratch and burry

the wild things.

They are what kept her at a window

watching beauty

rather than struggle with it,

rather than drink it, rather than touch it

and become.

Behind glass she would watch

the creatures roam through her fenced acre.

When she was young

they would come inside

and force other things

and stretch her body

or flatten it. Control it.

But she has brought things back from the woods and

they have caused.

So now she lunges forward, laughing.

They cower against the splintery corner.

She dances forward

with her toes in the mud.

Finding light is complicated

but she has it wrapped into her body, her mouth, her hands.

She moves, smiling, taunting,

wielding it to her desire.

Her quiet side wonders, along with tangled strands of hair

and a sore inner thigh

what this could be,

what it is.

Berries

I heard when she followed

some path decided on

into the woods

berries jumped down her mouth

as frogs into a puddle

and they rolled down her little throat

into her wavy stomach.

These ripe red things

swished around her concave middle

in tornado spins. As she walked,

having decided on the movement, the entered

berries became barriers in her vine veins

and then grew in bundles wherever they happened to latch.

I heard she sat in the middle of bushes and tree stumps

slowly watching her knees

transform from bone to stem.

I heard she found it was easier to sway

and grow back this way.

She decided early the contradictory weather

was reason enough to walk,

but she did not realize her body

would have to become the decision.

Her arms leaves. Her eyes pollen.

Her stomach a clearing

surrounded in wood.

She became.

As a collection of bushes

she could die in the winter

and come back in the spring,

she could flourish in the summer

and be eaten,

she could provide nourishment in early fall.

She could change her colors naturally,

at ease with the yearly death

that made her beautiful.

And most importantly, when it did frost

and when it did snow

she could be dormant with the knowledge

she would grow back in Spring.

I don’t know where she entered,

what path, what kind of berries animate

themselves enough to jump off stems

and into a child’s throat.

Maybe she ate them; picked them

with curious hands and put them on her innocent tongue.

But I heard they came alive, plunged themselves into her mouth.

I heard they came alive. I heard she

was happy with the result,

proud to have allowed a little girl’s body

to be taken by roots

and swallowed by the ground.

Her knew self could sway in the contradictory wind

and she preferred the ability to bend.

Come on thunder, please.

She often

takes the living room

and unscrews the lamps,

the furniture, detaches the

table tops from the legs

and asks you

what it means in this state.

She asks you

to put it all back in the

exact same order,

the same way her mother had it,

the same way her older sisters had it,

the same way she read and felt about it.

Sew the fabric over the cushion

and lay the legs strait

to attach the slabs of polished wood.

She consumes them like water.

And it runs through her miracle veins

splintery and solid.

She is spread as jam on the carpeting

and you go to lick

up the sweet leaking residue

in attempt to begin

the reconstruction.

What she also knows

wont hurt her;

You happen to have

arms made of

heavy things

and when they

walk into the house

and see what

she has done to serenity,

you will leave.

Even when she knows

her heavy thing legs

could rebuild with ease

what your arms could never carry.