it’s not the dying that’s so hard –
but this incessant surrendering o a life
you’d expected to beat.
against the odds we made it.
drenched and exhausted on some metaphorical shore
on an island of nothing.
we made it.
thank fucking god you were there too!
otherwise i would have swam back out to the sharks.
just said “eat me, cruelties, i’m through.”
But you were there –
reminding me we made it –
then this.
another round of chemo or fires or loss –
grief like a beggar lady we’ve simply let move in.
charming as the crazy and the sullen and the gone.
when i first met you
we had longing by the balls –
and we dared to cultivate everything –
desire, freedom, innocence –
loss. buried underneath honesty –
all of it true.
now this.
my awakening is thick like maple syrup
and dark like greed.
borrowing Medusa’s eyes
i sank the ship.
and again
you save me.
#70
yesterday when i died –
the black sky parted its lips
and said nothing.
what i hadn’t finished was my hellos.
and when that black sky refused to speak
and the eerie silence
made our insides tremble –
the everyday suffering people of the world
prayed for us.
they prayed for us.
it feels like there are less soft places
to land –
yet here we are –
living through our deaths
like the octopus.
a camouflage here –
hiding in a crack there.
i wonder how many arms we can live without?
#69
sometimes staying in bed or just disappearing
feels like a better option
than one more pull on the bootstrap
or half-hearted acknowledgement
of just how silver the lining really is.
we are tired.
it does not seem fair that while children are starving
simply because they are not our own
and people around us are ailing and dying
simply because its “part of being alive” –
that we should have to also put up
with some hack job politic or crumby job
or even a hurt of our own.
we are really that tired.
i’m hoping it will be okay someday
for you to tell me how broken you are
and for me to just hold you
without trying to fix you
or telling you how fortunate you really are.
and i am hoping that once we have all admitted
we are worn to the bone
by all this busy-ness of being alive
we can go back to feeding people
simply because they are hungry
and caring for people
simply because they are ill.
i’m not sure there is much more to figure out than that.
maybe feeding and caring
would be enough to change the world.
Sunrise
Your death is an angry wasp –
a hungry bear –
desire turned on it’s side,
blue.
I always wanted to tell you
something meaningful like god.
As if words could summon a heart –
a tiny rainbow of hope –
taking its cue
from some other side.
You were a Diva who understood dying
well before you were sick.
I was a poet
who traded my name for numbers
and lost my death
in a life half-lived.
Both of us always running
to beat our own lovely fall.
Your falling was a quiet farewell –
no more talking our way out of this one.
I said good-bye like a broken drum
while you commanded that heart to stop.
It seems we are both still trying to speak –
Me – a mad pen, tired bones, an ache –
You, a deplorable sunrise
another moon
the light.
london
We arrive sleepy and bent - a crumpled wad of desire for something new. These wet hot streets - a vistors reckoning - grief. But that is what you carried here my dear - packed neatly in your bags - folded, creased, alert. I tried to find the thing that made London her own. But, belonging to everyone and spread so densely through street upon alley upon court with flesh, she's a union of nations at once - scurrying about in search. The homeless prefer, it seems, to sleep in broad daylight beside a riot of words. There are no shoes, a tired beard, an altar of water bottles left at his feet. I thought about quitting marriage when I couldn't summon joy - as if London should ring that old bell back into awakening. But it was dinner time again - and every other door an open mouth for feeding. So we dine so we sleep so we rise once more and when you say good-bye i love you at last.
Losing
I am not sure loss can be measured
By how much we loved
Or what went missing
But for sure if it could
You got me.
#68
<>they gave me a little pill
so they could rip from my mouth
a word hoarder –
a shell of stories –
my having tossed caution to the wind tooth –
my ouch.
that taking made me think of giving
and how much there is to give still –
today, this very minute –
even as each of us hold our wounds,
ice our breaks, disguise our weaknesses.
i like that the lady who drove me home
gave me a one armed hug and said
no you are not fine
because she recognized there were bombs falling
and lights flashing and sirens blaring
behind my swollen crooked smile. Behind my face.
PTSD lingers around like an easy lover you cant quite forget.
You know how to handle her. You’re friends now. You can almost love her for having left. Then BAM! your sweating tears and lips are trembling. the heart – like an upside down fishing lure that has lodged itself in your throat. you’re fucking eyes all crying like a baby you don’t even know. Bitch.
Im trying to pacify her with a heating pad, sad coffee, slippers. no looking at mirrors. no noises. check. no sudden noises.
I tell you what; if I could get high without giving up 22 years of sobriety, I’d be all over it. As if something outside of me could make what’s inside of me right. Nah. But i can still see my brothers and sisters downtown, holding on to their treasure chest of traumas. and its cold out. PTSD is cold. maybe i can find a way to share these blankets under which i am finally starting to sweat.</>
#67
what would you do, heart without a cell phone ringing or me texting and snapping and retrieving one hundred and fifty times a day? what would you say, heart without me having to answer every forty emails, deleting forty more and bothering so much with Siri? what would happen to you, heart - in all your soft glory - if you could just beat and love and beat some more? intuiting the vastness of stars before night even falls. catching his breath before she walks into the room. embracing my child before he walks away. i remember when. there was a feeling. so much to feel really. so much more.
#66 Grief
grief is a quiet color - 
 gardenia who lost her scent - 
a reckoning.

 grief is without an hour - 
has no second hand -
 the face on a clock, gone.

 there is only space
 and a vacuous ledge to lean into. 
my fear - not of falling
 but that i will jump.

 when i am a whirling dervish of doing
 i can only be one way -
 productive.
 my heart sits on the sidelines
 cheering us both on
 but would never dare to interrupt. 

i come here to be reminded of the color:
 magenta
 fuscia 
aqua marine 
blue 
a light yellow blouse carrying bones.
 flesh and heart held up in the mix.

 i come here to celebrate
 even though i do not recall the occasion
 until I am here
 and sometimes
 not at all.

 i sit.
i admit.
i pull away from the ledge 
enough to breath
 but not so far as to pretend
 it isn't there. 

my grief is a yellow tricycle -
 empty basket -
 under a timber of sun. 

my grief is a magical final good-bye 
i was not there to make -
 with all the busyness
 of being busy.
 the doing of regret.

 they say that is a stage of grieving - 
as if recognizing its components 
could allow for some dismantling - 
but it is intact, i say.
 as certain as a two minute timer.
 this is how we are given a reprieve.
 maybe even forgiveness.
 the landmark for time.
#65
at union square
i always carry tiny wads of cash
to give to men in doorways
for whom no doors are open.
they are always much too gracious
considering the cold
and the ridiculous wonder
that while i was enjoying the theatre
they were begging for heat.
i am embarrassed sometimes
for how much i have.
2 healthy boys a husband
my friends a job
a home.
there are not enough ones or fives or even twenties
to make the kind of difference
that matters.
where you are no longer alone
or hungry or cold.
and i am no longer looking for someone to feed.
#64
when i reached for the moon and fell out of the crib i was moved to lower ground. when i fell out of the tree and broke my ankle i said who likes tree climbing anyway. when i wrote a poem and you said it moved you i thought i could write forever. then forever became a mighty long time and somewhere i decided it was maybe better not to reach. or to climb or to write. because what if with falling or breaking or resting i could no longer move you? and what if not doing means not being? and what if the climber leaps?
for Yvonne
i cannot say why it should be okay to have faith drawn out on a limb hanging mid air as if some sort of reconciling could warrant what's broken. there is no word nor sign nor even prayer that might at once undo the ruddy ache of having and losing and finally losing heart. what is terrible then is that we love. and our loving, like balloons in a hurricane, is torn from us - even as we covet the softest sweetness inside - where only his aliveness has touched you - where only he has been for you. i imagine though that he finds you - even now, through crooked slumber and honest despair - where if your eyes were closed you both could see and even if you did not touch you both could feel - there where your loving has allowed a living and a leaving - and both as honest as a thousand migrant winds - back and forth forever undoing and confirming what we think we know about life about death about love.
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#63
people are dying - and also there is cancer like a maniac bully breaking our hearts. i wanted to feel something - one time for itself - without another something to hold it up against or toward. but what's so is the tragic beauty of everything we love - dissolving in front of us as we become.
#62
for your birthday we poured martinis - threw fresh dough on a pizza stone and marveled at the magic of heat and cheese. just a few of us, this several pieces of one family you had made for yourself. good lord we all miss you.
#61
#60 for sarah
in the evenings, when even the bones are tired and every bit of energy that could be conjured has been - there is still a young rapper in his room - discovering the magic of words - and another boy, taking a vacation from the wonders of the cosmos and finance to play a video game with a friend. the noises are absolute. my dog curls up like a pinto bean - his big ears on alert. something inside me hungers. so much of a day spent doing remains undone until the heart has had her chance to rumble. the fingers their chance to skip across the black pavers - at last awake.
#59 for margaret ann
your dying is a lazy mountain waterfall without an end. i am looking under rocks - in between the manzanita and madrone - under moss and lichen - hands deep in a hollowed oak trying to find the empty. but there is still too much. an overwhelming overflowing of your aliveness - a certain surely still at home i am here about it. a lie. or not. you left me a ruby rimmed with diamonds - a crimson and aqua rug - some china and a desk. ee cummins,david sedaris,the best loved poems of jacki o. a life of scripture, "everything that is yes" love. we pretended to bury you yesterday. but you were there at lunch running the show. and now i am thinking about what is lovely and there you are again and me and we.
the attic
we have always liked to organize things differently. you file beautiful next to exquisite and lush and tradition - your systems become tasteful displays of abundance - while i like to purge and name the spaciousness something pretty. you bring the color while i remove the things that filter it. you have big soft hands and a warm heart and room to hold every little thing that is sacred close. my hands are dry from all the scrubbing and i try my best not to hold on to things. still, i will leave your home every time with my arms full of certain special gifts i could not have lived without. a poem clipped from an old magazine - an ancient alligator suitcase - the rusted locks and tired lining proof that you can stop time. and i would. stop time. i wonder how many times i have taken the fake poinsettias down - tripping over my own feet and the heavy curtains that line the closet - the ladder leaning against the wall like an old friend i have used twice a year forever. the string of christmas lights in a round hat box that i will not test this year breaks me. but i do not cry. only some of them would have lighted. and i would have wrestled them around the tree like i do every year, finding out a little too late that one string needs to be replaced, again. you would point out the holes where the light is not enough. where it is dark. we will fill the tree with color again - every year with your box of color - we will fill the tree to overflowing - all the sparkling glass balls and crystal boxes, the shiny bundles of red berries and intricate ornamentation - the precious hold-it-in-your-hand beauty - the loveliness of things made meaningful by your keeping. this time you say go ahead and give the poinsettias away and we act like it is no big deal. someday when we have grown weary of the attic i will ask you for the ladder. this is how she taught me i will say to make beauty worth giving away and memories worth keeping. i will have tiny clippings of poems and articles cut - things you saved and stored and finally delivered as if it were no trouble at all that you cared enough to save it. this year we'll get the tree early and maybe spill red wine on the sofa or not use coasters. we will have known better and that will be what counts. that because of you we will have known better.
#57
i wanted to bring you flowers - lift the scent of jasmine out of the air or carry the wind with me - to where you were hiding, under the sleep-strained sheets and the empty bottles - to before pills and drink and men could destroy you. but you won't answer the phone or the door or the possibility of things being different - because, you say, there is no hope - inside these dark hours - these endless moments of grief - this constant feeling of loss. i say i have been there - have run full bore into the darkness myself - trying to get there before it could come get me. how i have buried myself also - under the impenetrable longing and the shame - and the elusive promise of forgetting. you still think i couldn't possibly understand, that no one can possibly understand. but we do. So many of us truly do. i once held the hand of a beautiful woman while she pushed a baby out of her body into the world. Two years later, I held that baby while we buried her beautiful mother into the earth. She'd been found dead - kicked to death in a crack house just outside of town. She was one of us - someone with dreams and fears and love and concern - a lifetime of new beginnings and loss. And it started with just one little pill. When i call you - which i will do - again and again and again until you answer, because i recognize that you are ill and not just a pain in the ass - i will say come outside and smell the wind, watch the morning unfurl with me - she how it just opens up quietly into the darkness instead of against it - until all signs of night are simply gone. and look how we are standing here alone - just you and me - and also a million other people inside their houses and their cars under their bridges and in alleys and parks. All of us watching the light open up - wondering how we will do it. what we will choose - while there is still a choice to be made.
#56
finally, i got so tired of words - and the way they were being used to destroy what we love and who we love and even how - that i quit them. just stopped writing. like the fury of a hundred years could be contained instead in prayer. but when the answers didn't line up and my own silence started to feel more like cowardice - i quit that too. had a run with rage. and ignorance. i found it is terrible to hate, even the haters. so I'm picking up the words again - like so many wild flower seeds - and i am throwing them into the wind. into the abominable hatred - even as it tries to oppress - i am throwing the words and the seeds and the light back in the face of the darkness and i am hoping that in the midst of all this dirt and manure - our wild flowers will grow. And they will take over all this shameful, barren bullshit with their outrageous color.