that's mrs. mediocrity to you

I couldn’t sleep for weeks
and then I remembered that I needed to write.

Ariel was always a dream, but a wakeful one,
whispering pictures and posturing portent.

I don’t need to sing, my body
is always happy to do that for me.

There’s a fire burning inside me (literally)
at the same time there’s a fire
burning down the world.

I lay awake at night and rage at everything,
but in a peaceful way.

I eat grace for breakfast and anomaly for lunch.

Everything has too many calories.
Something else I have to burn.

I can only sleep when my feet are cool
and mine are scorching these sheets
like my mother’s old iron.

This room is never dark enough,
and I am never really here.

It doesn’t matter.

Matter is energy and I am combustible.
I float like a gas just south of the ceiling.

No one ever notices, which is funny.
Except when I get stuck in cobwebs.

I’ve lived in this house longer than I haven’t.
It’s small and tiny and we are always tripping over each other.

I trip over everything anyway.

It’s winter and I miss the sky.

The snow geese are down at the swamp screaming injustice.

On New Year’s Eve the fireworks gave them fits
and I smiled as I stood
alone in the center of road
as white sparks drifted down
like lost feathers.

.

.

.

there will always be days
stretched tight
by the too dry skin
of living

there will always
be evil
rubbing shoulders
with light

always be witches
dancing circles
at night

always a cloud
blotting out
the gold sun

always loss and possibility
mixing chance
in roiling ocean

it doesn’t have
to be enough

or even
filling

warmth is the illusion
of life

parody is pure
in the blossom of sight

and green things grow
from the cracks
in black ice

.

.

.

the world we sit in
and the world we live in
have become
two different things

by now
fifteen minutes
is the measure
of antipathy
and data
the construct
of worth

observation
has replaced
interaction

i see you
you see me

we do not touch

i know one thing
about you

you know
three things
about me

it all adds up

we can’t
catch up

.

.

.

just ask nature, she’ll be happy to let you know
that dance was invented by willows
weeping at winter’s impostor
and stars are made from moans left hanging
on a breeze in the corner of reflection

.

we are all mirrors on the same wall of eternity
chanting hope and charity with leavening

.

this circle this tree this mind mattering
tossed by cold gale and rent from warm earth
growth and decimation occur concurrently
it doesn’t matter where you stand
it doesn’t matter where you stand

.

darkness always returns
as does mo(u)rning

.

.

.

.

fifteen years later
that’s what we call it

not nine eleven oh one
not September 11, 2001
just
nine eleven

two words

three digits

two towers

four planes

thousands

of

mothers
fathers
daughters
sons
sisters
brothers
wives
husbands
aunts
uncles
girlfriends
boyfriends

not statistics

falling

from

the

sky

not dates
or where were you’s

just whole hearts
in odd numbers

each one

the only necessary

evidence

of love

::

.

I wrote this for the 10-year anniversary
of this tragic, horrid event.

I am re-posting it again today, in honor of all those hearts.

Never forget.

.

the wind tells tales of emptiness
littering wide roads with leaves just released
from the captivity of decent living

beneath a sky gone grey with culture
an empty swamp sags with the pattern of destruction
heron filled and heron full on rotting fish and
stain stitched opportunity

and all the green has rolled inward, hoping for storm
or honest anger
finding nothing but dry heat hot
from the memory of august
balanced on the razor of reduction

the sun sinks red and rises false rose golden
as blinding answers dive
into the dusty hardheart crevasse of question
playing host to this catalog of possibility

while the distant beauty vulture
screams his mocking two-faced litany
of violent regeneration

.

.

.

it’s so easy to focus on the flaws.

easy to miss the forest for the trees when you want to keep standing in the shade.

the big picture contains so much information, when all i want is this leaf or that berry or maybe even a thorn.

a pair of cardinals live in the yard just now, young it seems, and foolish, often landing just feet away from NaughtyKitten. I want to warn them, run at them arms high and voiced raised to scare them off for good. but i like having them here, listening to their incessant chirp, and i like that they land just outside the door. perhaps i admire their optimism.

but inside me, a little voice keeps saying do something, as if i’m the one in charge, as if it’s all up to me, as if i can fix the situation.

it rained last night for the first time in months. at least any sort of rain that meant anything, we’ve had a few sprinkles here and there, but this was thunder and lightning and a brief downpour, which is better than no downpour at all. no matter that it meant i got no sleep.

this morning the humidity stands tall in the yard, and i wonder if the flowers revel in the sauna, or if it just makes them feel tired and lazy, too.

i smell the pepper of phlox and marvel that the plant is still there, just outside my window, despite the fact that i’ve planned to dig it up for years. i have no desire to count how many.

the circus has come to america’s backyard, but no one knows who is selling the tickets.

i wonder if the babies will survive.

i wonder if those cardinals and the cat have made a pact.

i wonder if i’m crazy for thinking these things.

a small airplane makes itself known overhead, disturbing the stillness.

i wonder what’s it’s like to fly so high.

.

.

.

we want things to be black and white and the world is made of color. we don’t even get shades of grey to choose from, we get red and purple, orange and blue, green and yellow. we get the full spectrum, an elusive rainbow made of light and still, all those colors are never enough.

my garden is thirsty. i’m thirsty. we’re all thirsty for something, always. we’re all here beneath the same blue sky, the same night stars, the same tired sun, and the world spins round the way it always has. we think we know better. we refuse to see the forest for the trees because the trees refuse to acknowledge our presence.

i step outside at night and listen. i look up at the stars and there are no answers, only questions. i know the names of some of the constellations, but others i’ve forgotten. i don’t bother relearning them because i’m tired of naming things. some of them don’t even exist anymore, even though i can see them. a name seems so irrelevant.

gravity holds me in place and keeps me silent and makes me laugh with the cage of its promise.

i’m not a tree because i’ve never grown roots. every tree out there has made that decision. but i’m the one carrying water. and i have no idea what that means.

we thought shoes were a good invention. and guns. and cars to carry us to other places. we think we are smarter than ourselves.

this is a prayer and i don’t pray. this is a mantra that needs no chant. this is the morning a flower will open.

we are not seeds but we know how to hold them.

we plant hope and beg for rain.

the sky is grey, the sky is blue, the sky is orange.

all of these things are true.

or false.

depending on the day.

.

.

.

digging deep through poisoned soil
seeking hope or refuge or both
and the flower opens
and we think pretty
but it’s all
just a matter
of survival

“this is not really happening—
you bet your life it is”*

hang your head
nod hello
run
stand your ground

i can’t remember

i can’t remember

your name
is
silence
or alice
or delilah

i can’t remember

and all you ever wanted
was bloom

.

.

.

(*from Tori Amos’ Cornflake Girl)

I want to say the smell of death is just outside my window. I want to say that’s not a metaphor, it’s a real thing, and I think it’s the young robin I thought I’d saved from the cat last week. I want to say I know we’re not supposed to talk about these things, no one wants to hear it, but then again, there it is.

And then I want to say that of course it’s a metaphor, because everything becomes one eventually.

The poppies bloomed a few days late this year, waiting until June to tilt their heads in the breeze. But I sat in my garden and wrote on Memorial Day, the last time I sat long enough to listen to the words constantly crashing through my mind. I wrote about birds and flowers and cats and sky. Trees just gone green and clouds skipping along the horizon, July clouds in May, July temperatures in May, July laziness seeping into my bones.

I watched a turkey vulture floating overhead and thought it was beautiful with bits of gold sun glinting off wide wings, and it was. Beautiful. But a vulture means death, and there that was, too.

I don’t sit like that enough these days, I’m too busy trying to survive. And I know that’s a shame, I know it, but platitudes and dreams don’t pay the bills and the world isn’t waiting for anybody. I think about art and change and the internet and the pool that keeps spreading wider even as the world gets smaller and it feels like we are all just trying to keep our heads above water. Some days I think of that scene in Laura Ingalls’ On the Banks of Plum Creek when the locusts hatch and start walking, marching into the creek right on top of one another until it fills up enough to become a bridge of bodies. And they just keep walking because, of course, they have someplace to be.

I made this garden in my backyard, a place to rest my weary bones, and I don’t sit here enough because I’m too busy walking to a place I’ll never get to. And that’s not angst, it’s reality, and I’m wearing the shoes I paid for. Flip flops with a pebble lodged in the rubber, flip flops I will use to crush the giant ant that dares enter the kitchen when the grandbaby is crawling on the floor. Once, I would have let that ant live, but these days instinct wins every argument.

I remember when I used to go barefoot, all summer long, inside and out. I remember everything and everyone, every loss and every sacrifice, every joy and every smile. I remember this garden thirty years ago when it was nothing but lawn and driveway.

From my chair in the corner I can see the breeze but I cannot feel it. I watch the poppies dance and think, for a second, about getting up to join them.

Maybe tomorrow.

Some days are just for watching. And listening. And thinking about life. Or death. Or both.

It’s all in there, and my garden (another metaphor) is a mess and my feet are tired, but I am here, these flowers are here, these clouds in the bright blue sky are here, moving across the horizon.

Now.

Here.

Always.

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