Good Bye

I woke up in a puddle with his memory
wrapped around me. The angels were heavy tonight.
I welcomed him back from the dead tonight,
but he did not welcome life.

He must have been tossed down from Heaven,
after riding Angels bare-back. His jaw was clasped tight,
reminding me of December when the snow fell so
hard that it dug into the backs
of the trigger happy.

We watched death fall out together, a few flights
up, before he dropped the dog on his tail.
Life must remind him of amputation now.

He took me to his rickety, flimsy boyhood.
I scolded him about the thin boards
nailed together clumsily,
and told him that this was not a safe place to be.
He protested it’s security.

He never asked for his old things, but I had them.
They were treasures.
Old t-shirts, books, jewelry. My frustrated fingers
rummaged through
everything that he could have come back for.
But, he did not want.

I told him, “do you know what it is going to do
to me if you die again?”, then I realized that he did not breathe,
or pulsate, or belong…

my eyes began to flood, and then I heard a voice,
from silence,
from life,
from inside…

“Oh!  This is her saying good-bye!”

Tree Legs

I have peculiar bark on my long tree legs,
it grows in layers.

When I was eight, I was a fresh baked apple pie.
My mother never told me why, but I know
it was because of the tears.

My tree legs drank them every day,
while mother explored my cold sweats.
She picked them off my forehead with
smiling fingertips. Eager for discovery!

She poked through my warm crust, straight to my soft apples,
spoiling my fruit,
rotting them with her murky breath.
I was an apple pie

until the world never died.
I realized, at that precise moment,
that I was a foul smell;
putrid. I had dried up and crumbled.

There was nothing left for me but
these long, strong tree legs….

and bark.

The Drums Began

and then they left their home,
one by one, the salty fluid pouring
into each other, God called
down to Margaret that morning;

“I know spaces between stones,
that, years ago, repressed me.
A harp was broken by an angel,
and now you shall go empty.”

Drums beat wild; a spell of evils
cast up from Hell’s almighty.
Can I exist, just as this?
A nightmare in a body?

I was given a black trail,
a tricycle, and blindly
left my post beneath the drums
to find captivity.

I listened from a noisy Inn
near the Mighty Mississippi,
its waters shook all voice
and took it selfishly.

So, I went, to a purple mountain,
to visit Mighty Oak Trees,
but my tears tried to drown
me there, drip, drip, dripping.

Heaven became worth it when
I had realized it hardly,
every stone and every man
awaited hardening,

I sat in line, in silence
with them, picking at my knees,
when fire grabbed a child’s limb
and she screamed in agony.

I found that I was not an
Angel, the devil had been dwelling
in wine and liquor and
my heart had, all this time, been failing.

Canker Sore

I think of my skeleton as a
canker, burning hollow in
a deep, deep cave.

My son cries about my skeleton and
I tell him,
“hush now! It is just bones. 
It is just white, not blood or bed.”
And it is not.

I have a long, thin canker and
I have a man with knitting hands.
He wraps me in warm stitches;
in strong pursuit.
He points me with pressed thumbs
just enough that
I pound with his heartbeat.

I am a canker and he is a mouth hosting
an ulcer. He cleans,
cauterizes me with searing tips and
I cry about my skeleton and he says,
“hush now, it is just bones.”
But, it is not.