Mixed Marriage

"We are not like other families,"

remarked my father

impaled sideways through his head by a stick,

feet dancing in thin air.

My mother wore black crepe

though her husband lived yet, suspended,

and I, the fruit of her womb, refused her invitation

to stay still beneath her fingers at the bottom of the bath.

We had a dog with a nervous condition

and a ghost in the basement by the water softener.

My father covered the story and his un-impaled eye,

seeing old sweethearts in his dreams.

Mother tried to move me into the basement incinerator,

but was prevented by the ghost. 

Daddy liked swing music and Dixieland jazz,

insisting the stick was a clarinet and the dog Benny Goodman,

And though not observant, he did walk on Saturdays.

__________

for Sunday Muse #134, where I am hosting.

Dharma Baby

With milk stirred into my tomato soup, I was wild as a landscaped yard,
worldly as a tabby kitten.
Still, venomous lies thorned my pulse with the odd fist thrown in for punctuation.

Staying corner-quiet as the vacuum slammed the baseboards a room away,
I searched for a kind of touch on the bottom book shelves.
As soon as I could, I went feral, a lonesome library hider ghosting the book store, on my way to a gifting high of pages and substances,
a bad apple for a sick teacher.

Kerouac and other people's cars, coolers of beer,
paperbacks on the back seat, center lines snaking by,
these were my caduceus and my catechism.
I ate Vonnegut,
drank Brautigan,
shot up Burroughs,
fucked Ferlinghetti but not my road companions.

My boozy keepers kept me from a thousand mistakes.
Off all summer from their classrooms, 
they had no wives to explain shit to, 
just me in the hungover mornings, useless and funny as a three-legged cat.

I almost died.
Wrote some tripe in blood and got it published.
Joined a book club and the human race,
married wrong, raised a child,
kept my books like holy relics, poetry bones on which I learned to stand and stumble and survive.

I built a new heart out of sentences,
slept with other women,
changed my name, went too far but did it sober.
"Why do you keep these old books?"
Because they are life rafts,
holy texts,
soul food,
lovers who never leave.
They are me and I am them, a bad crowd lit with halos.

You can go if you want,
I am beyond injury anymore.
The nurses here make bedding from chapbooks,
whisper soft as pages turning,
are immortal,
and know my name.

4/18/2020
________________

for the Sunday Muse #104 where I am hosting.

Hawk and Hollyhock

In late evening, my spirit slipped its mews
and perched watching me--my remainder self--
broad-leafed, overtall, growing from a gap in the step.

There were heels on the paving stones,
a spill of some harsh but bone-known tongue.

I woke, the tether caught--
the mews reoccupied. 
I rose, swayed; hawk & hollyhock in temporary union. 
______________

Note:  In falconry, a mews is a birdhouse designed to house one or more birds of prey. In falconry there are two types of mews: the freeloft mews and traditional mews. Traditional mews usually consist of partitioned spaces designed to keep tethered birds separated with perches for each bird in the partitioned space.

A 55 for my BFF.

Haunted House

It was haunted, the house I grew up in;
some old bastard from olden days,
mostly hanging out in the basement, by the water softener.

Many times I stopped my stuffed animal games mid-sentence and froze.
"Get the fuck out," he'd say by turning the air thick and heavy
like green sky late on an April afternoon.

I'd take the slime-colored linoleum stairs two at a time,
my tail on fire, a little spark in a hurry to hit the sky.
Oh god oh god oh god...but no god down there.

Upstairs, better wear a parka, better be a hidden rabbit
if my mother was in one of her silent rages.
She didn't like imperfections, and there I was, made of them.

Daddy's books were birds that flew off the shelves
into my hands. "What's this one?" I'd ask
a million times and always got an answer.

When they got divorced, the dead man came upstairs;
He'd crawl up my back sending every hair on end,
then clatter the cutlery in the kitchen when nobody else was home.

My father had taken his books and a second wife.
My mother's parents had just died, and she'd had to get a job at fifty-five.
After she tried to kill herself and failed, she switched to me.

I wouldn't die, though;
there were enough pissed-off ghosts there,
and so I made the world my basement stairs and ran.
_______

For "The House That Built You" at Real Toads.

 

Love Letter From Cassie

Your pound-of-flesh-an-hour Methodist lawyer
argued inevitable discovery
while you sat looking poleaxed and lopsided--
not at all the old Pooky Bear I used to know.

Even without the medium,
(he argued)
my tawdry lesbian affair with some chick on the next street
would have been found out.

I was hoping you wouldn't notice
when I signed the pre-nup "Eleanor Roosevelt,"
and you didn't.
Why start noticing shit now?

In the old days, I could have burned the house down;
could have run a marijuana farm in the barn,
under those lights, I forget what they call them.
Now, one little kiss and it's see you in court.

Look, if you want to fight dirty,
if you want to hurt each other, listen to this:
my girlfriend got me pregnant,
and it isn't yours.

I think this judge is rude,
having me removed like that.
At least I get to watch tv,
though it only seems to get this one retarded courtroom show.

On our wedding night,
when you texted your undying love,
you forgot to Mirandize me
before I said all that other stuff.

It's all fruit of the poison tree,
you and me.
Sorry if I ruined your life,
but we're done here,

and they're releasing me on my own recalcitrance.
Try to move on, Poopsie Pie,
though really,
after me, it's gonna be all downhill from here.
______ 

 

Undead

Oh, don't look so stunned,
as if you'd found a snaky stowaway in your yarn basket--
my crazy green skin hiding in your orderly museum of every shade of gray.

Love is a beautiful emotion.
I know,
I saw it depicted on television when I was ten.
On a black and white screen in my aunt and uncle's basement,
a raven beauty of a Vampire Queen
made something turn deliciously over inside of me,
easy as cow-tipping,
cheesy,
thrilling,
the way it would always be from then on,
with every woman I loved.

I am the package you didn't order,
the garden you started, then regretted,
and the riddle you'll never answer.

So, why do I keep turning back to see you,
still holding up your cross,
casting its shadow on the very blood in my veins
that I can never get far enough away from to deny?
_________

for Get Listed at Real Toads. I used ten of the words: yarn, stunned, garden, package, cow-tipping, stowaway, riddle, crazy, and television.

Advice

I was a chattering child
living in the Sturm und Drang
until a jealous dark star filled my mouth with snow and silence.

There I stayed, a drift with nothing to say
for decades and donkey's years,
feet nailed to the floor to prevent St. Vitus' Dance.

Though silent, I was not stupid--
I hid my heart in the hollow of a tree
until such time as I could own the fever, 
like a yogi or a bush doctor.

Over ages, slow as a slat-leaked barrel,
I incubated language inside my teeth;
each word sharp as truth and long as lies.

I pulled the nails up inside my feet,
until I had claws, and when I finally moved,
it was under a sign-moon, quick as a curse.

I spat out the snow and my mouth learned new tricks--
there were the poems I garlanded from asters and barbed wire.
There were the women who listened, and whom I kissed.

Long ago, I went back to claim my heart from the tree,
and bargained with the guardian owl for a fair price
and her share of a summer night.

I gave myself a name, and the name means "beloved".
From that day until this, I have walked up and down upon the earth;
the snakes know me and hush their hiss.

Still, for all that, here is what I have learned,
and it is a woman's lesson, to be kept in a locket,
in a trunk, in secret, against bad fortune when it comes in threes:

Remember, girl,
that silence may still have its moment.
Remember the bird who can hide your heart,
and when the wind swings down and the moon goes dark,
remember you can run.
Remember 
you can run.

_______

top image "In The Woods 2" by onkami, both images found on weheartit.com

poem idea inspired by the Catie Curtis song "Run", which I can't find a video of, but the lyrics can be found HERE.

Calling All Angels

On a night when the moon went dark,
and I spilled unchecked from the broken glass of my life,
from my knees I whispered,
calling all angels
calling all angels
if you can hear me,
send me a sign.

In my hour of no hour left,
in the minutes when the indigo stars scorned my name,
from my knees I whispered,
calling all angels
calling all angels
in my extremity I called to them,
and the angels, in their mercy, came.
________

for my Calling All Angels challenge at Real Toads. 

at the lowest point of my alcohol addiction, when I thought I was worth nothing, and that the future held nothing, I prayed. Every day since, that prayer has been answered, and I am astonished and humbly grateful.
 

28 years

"I stumble and fall, baby I've done it all, I'm only human on the inside." --Chrissie Hynde "Human"

 28 years ago today, two things happened. My favorite aunt died, and I took my last drink, from that day to this. I'd been trying, in that summer of 1985, to kick it. I'd been trying to get that beast to just shut up and stop calling me, stop grabbing me, stop sucking me empty from the inside. 

When you find yourself teetering on a chair, armed with a broom, maniacally trying to knock scads of spiders off of the ceiling, it's not social drinking anymore. It took me ten years of boozing to get that far. I was dedicated. Ain't livin' long like this, am I baby? 

I'd first gone to AA the year before, in 1984, and I'd string together a few months and then relapse. In the late summer of 1985, a 500-pound gorilla had assigned himself to ride on my back 24/7. I fought him off a day at a time, an hour at a time, for weeks on end. I'm talking about a very real pressure, almost a goading, to drink, that leaned on me every waking minute. 

Finally, I did. When I saw my messed-up self in the mirror the next morning, with my head and heart pounding from the poison, I realized how much I had started to like the sober me I had been seeing up til then. I told myself to remember that moment, looking at wrecked me in the mirror. I never wanted to see that person again.

But the craving and compulsion came back soon enough. I'd done meetings, phone calls, literature, will power (ha!), the whole deal, and still I'd relapsed cos the hold was just too strong. So I prayed. I asked Goddess to take over and ride me through it, to get me past what I couldn't get past on my own; to see me through, sober, until morning. When the sun came up, there was one damn dead gorilla, and me still sober. I've stayed sober ever since, by the grace of Divine intervention. 28 years, today.

Addiction is no joke. My best friend from teenage days is dead because of it. I am only here because something bigger than me cared. I had no power over alcohol, but now I have the power to say "no" to that first drink, one day at a time. My son, my friends, my employer, none of them have ever had to deal with me drunk. I am nobody's expert at Life, but I know to treasure a gift when it's been given to me, and every day I wake up sober is a gift. 

28 years. Today. Thank you, Goddess.