She looks to see if anyone
is watching,
Quietly, like the snow that
will soon be falling, she floats
out the front door,
Heart-pounding as she races to the little cottage,
the tiny home, warm hearth - slightly in shambles,
but beautiful nonetheless, she thuds on,
Her feet hit the cobblestone path
rhythmically until she smiles contentedly
at the butter yellow light gleaming
from her cottage window,
She bursts through the front door, smiles at
the women sitting, sifting, at the table,
Today is the day,
The day when this dream is put to
rest in the ground,
She sits, and sifts, through photos and
snapshots of cathedrals and tea shops,
Remembering, nostalgic, wistful,
'Memories now' says one of the women,
and she nods, yes, memories...

Scullery Maid

I scrabble at the outskirts of your life,
Your scullery maid of sorts,
I wash your clothes and dishes, feed you
and provide you companionship when
you ring your tiny bell,
You are the sick old woman in the West Wing
of the mansion,
and I am continuously scraping up the remains of
your humanity,
Your mess and your miserable life,
I used to try valiantly to be part of your world,
To be a piece of your happiness,
But you shove a dustpan in my hand and
force me to sweep myself from the corners
of your crumbling life,
As if I don't exist,
As if I never really were here at all,
I suppose this is your way of coping with life,
At least - that's what your pitiful excuse for a therapist
would have said...but what did she ever know...

Ravings

3:20 am in the largest cities in the world,
Who sleeps in them, I always wonder,
Who sleeps at this hour that exhales, finally,
the somber breath of the day prior in a thick, hot
expulsion,
Not I,
Not I or any of the other vagabond-artist-mentally-ill type
loons who spend their time circling and cycling in and out
of bars and psychiatric wards where we keep one hand open for a
glass of Jack Daniels and the other for a new medication from
Jesus Christ M.D.
We swallow our pills and shoot up our
veins and babble to our shrinks and don't sleep, forget
to eat, eat too much, hate our fathers, ignore our mothers when they
call Sunday afternoons at 4pm, turn slowly into the broken skulls of
Chatty Cathy dolls, maniacally and hysterically clattering on about
how broken we feel.
Meanwhile Sir Therapist of Yore nods gravely and says it's
marvelous how we are really "feeling our feelings" and we are "much improving"
even though we are piercing our own flesh with needles, visiting the tattoo shops and carving letters, notes, epitaphs and eulogies into our own flesh with whatever sharp objects we can find.
We spin like Mad Hatters on the teacup's saucer in Alice's Wonderland where she's obviously taken too many God forsaken pills and now we're on another of her Bad Trips. Can that woman never learn to just NOT eat the cake and drink the potion? Fuck!
We're waking up in the nuthouse, no idea how we've gotten there, overdosing on knowledge and starving to death emotionally because we're so fucking poor that all we've got is money. We chase men and women and skirts and heels and makeup and TV's and cars and boys and "kiss kiss" the cheek and 'hey how's it going, sexy' and one night stands and three night stands in some seedy hotel before your next botchy suicide attempt because no one, in all of the hospitals can look you in the face, through all of the psycho-babble and just tell you that you matter and that you're loved, which is all you really need to hear anyfuckingway. So you sleep with that person, fuckfest for three days straight, drugs and booze, forget the food, kick them out at the end, sloppy kiss and send em out the damn door - 'bye, darlin', it's been real but ya know how it goes,' and they cuss you out clear to their car. You turn back inside, take the rest of whatever you've got, wait for it to kick in and call the ambulance. Maybe you'll make it - maybe you wont.
When you were a kid they sold you some bullshit about an American Dream. You were brought up in the hood and you got stuck with this shit instead. But whatever. You'll take it you guess.


Sirens as you pass the fuck out.  

Wild

She is wild,
and unkempt,
She washes her hair
in the cold mountain stream
and the inky blackness of night,
Shaking it madly, fiercely,
Droplets of rainwater becoming
stars on the velvet-sky
of her life,
She sleeps beneath the
cosmos,
Nestled in a tree
as if she were but a very tiny
bird,
Stretching, languid,
in the buttercup softness
of morning light,
Her skin is scrubbed free of
civilization by sand, dirt,
grasses - tall and overgrown,
She smells of honeysuckle
and autumn winds,
Lips full and red - as if
nettles had grown beneath her skin, 
She sings with the wolves
and dances upon the nimbus
of freedom,
She speaks every language
except domestication,
She is the wild woman who lives
deep in my bones,
& I am trying to set her free

Falling Apart

     You would think, by now, that I would have consumed enough pills to numb the searing hot pain in my soul. But no.
     You would think after 30 bottles of I-forgot-what-they-were that I would have been able to drown you out, even for just a night, just to get some small reprieve from this. But no.
     You would think that after all this time, the blade wouldn't call to me the way that it does. Brain begging on it's knees, practically prostrate on the floor before me, to let it breathe. The torture killing it slowly. But no.
     You would think that after all of the empty nights with strangers who I used to call friends, that I would have been able to get you off of my mind. But no.


Dreams of you still wake me in the early morning
hours, blissful and bittersweet, ripping
me from slumber,
Only to be reminded that I am alone,
It's like saying goodbye all over again.
Over and over and over, every night,
and while, goodbye may have only
lasted there, in that terminal for you -
it haunts me the way images of your face
haunt me if I stop to breathe for even
a single moment,
So I hold my breath, move & barely sleep,
& sleep? I have forgotten how to
do it properly, love,
I am a woman unraveling at
an alarming rate,
Alarming, even to me,
and unraveling is my most
perfected art form, you see,
I cannot fuck it up even if I tried,
Food doesn't stay down,
Drugs don't last long enough, and
What am I supposed to do now?
The knife in my bag seems so
alluring...
What do I do now....

Priory

& it was there,
kneeling in my soul to the
beauty of the abandoned priory,
the kind of beauty that sucks
the very breath from your throat,
that I realized the bitter truth,


I realized that all I loved
and would love forever
was leaving me -
and I could touch it no more,
at least not in this life,


I looked at you and saw the grief
of my impending departure
immolating your heart,
I decided to beg God just one
more time to let me stay,
'Please just let me stay'
and there, in the whispering
wind through empty, leafless trees,
my answer was whispered,


So I drank you as deeply as
I could,
mouth on yours, palm
cupping your face beneath the
facinorous entanglement of
tree-fingers,
You know the kind, the
ones that only a tornado can
comb through,


& I knew our tornado had only just
begun to pull us apart...

Some Days

I'm sifting through my memories again,
Plucking them from my soul
and trying to keep them vivid
so I don't forget you,


& do you know what it's like
to lose touch with all you see?
What it's like to unwillingly
forget paradise?


I try to touch a time
and place where I remember
being whole,
Whole as I will ever be,
& on good days - I graze the
surface with my fingertips,
Come away with the smell of the sea,
the rushing waves,
the sound of petulant rain,
the taste of meat pies
and the feeling of savouring a
pasty, half-hearted, before a
cathedral so breathtaking
that it's beauty had stood the test of time
for thousands of years,
and wondering, absent-minded,
if our love would stand that test, too,


Some days I am not
so vividly fortunate,
Some days I can barely recall the
tiny laugh lines that etched themselves
into your face and continued
to etch deeper the longer we entwined
in time,


I aged you, I know,
Burned my cosmic fingerprint
on your eyes and around your mouth
every time you laughed or smiled,
I hope you don't regret it,
I never will,
I hope even when you're old
and covered with a hundred more
lines and wrinkles -
You think of me...and remember
I marked you first,
Marked you as my very own...