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Friday, September 30, 2011

A SINGLE LIGHT AT YOUR DOORSTEP

While living in the midst of the illness of my father-in-law, we should all pray for the positive health for the ones we love.

“Compassion is sometimes the fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else's skin. It is the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too.”
Frederick Buechner



A Single Light at Your Doorstep

As the moon rose and set,
I let you
go on my
plea of promised sleep
even though

my heart mourns sea blue
and
the yellow of pollen,
thick with infection, and

there is no time for you
or me
to find compassion
in this chaotic
trilogy filled with loss.

I will let you rest from another
day of
hidden sorrow, from a
tragedy that has not yet
hit your house,

and still you show
up under
the guise of giving flowers
on a sunny
day in October.

Monday, September 26, 2011

LUNCH TIME

I have one word for this poem. Endurance.

A door opens to me. I go in and am faced with a hundred closed doors. ~Antonio Porchia


Lunch Time

A riveting wild smile, the girl turned into
every woman as she walked through parallel doors.
The slow flow of her intimacy came from within and
she was camouflaged inside her demur destiny of
feathered words and unspoken lifetimes.

Unspoken between the turned kitchen table
and the white alleyway of a frozen bed,

between the rage of words unsaid,
each etched in the memory of a stone,
and between the lives that follow her
from a hundred states of black, white, and gray.

Each minute left a little bit of someone else
in her pining mouth,
in her pulsing fluid soul,
in her fate of dictated wills, all
churning in rhythmic certainty.

She was incapable of staying; all the while
she was incapable of moving away.
She was simply incapable of departing
on that day her children came home.

Thursday, September 22, 2011

RED RED RED

I was going through some old papers and I found this poem that I wrote 23 years ago. I changed it a bit although it reflects the woman that I was at 24 as well as the woman I am today.

I THINK that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree.
Joyce Kilmer



Red Red Red

Intermingled,
our calloused hands weep.
Painfully, we wait for
time to erase the night
that we just endured.
We walk through
the dimly lit woods.

The dark envelopes us and
nature continues to plead
with her shadowed humor.
Internally, my ego convinces
me to walk until my heart
adjourns
and turns to leave
with the hazy moon.
One pair of human
hands continue
to turn counter clockwise.

Looking up to the kaleidoscope
of lost tree tops,
so much depends upon
the black shards of leaves.
I am a single one standing still,
so small as
our sapling love
fills my own heart with
a vivid dismay.

It is the small seeds of
love and hate.

Monday, September 12, 2011

THE TENTH PART

I tried to explain to my girls the concept of communication when I was their age. I told them that I would walk down the street to the drug store where the public pay phonebooth was to make a call to my girlfriend. I wanted privacy to talk about what ever was so important. You know...the land line in the kitchen did not stretch far enough away from curious ears. We laughed saying it was the 1980's cell phone. Maybe times have changed although I believe it is where you look to see how people communicate.

“Hello, hello. This is Romeo. Calling from a jackpot telephone.”
No Souvenirs by Melissa Etheridge



The Tenth Part

The metal accordion door closes; I’m breathing. I finger
the silver dime and drop it into the coin slot. Written directions
to make a call, our future connection is harder to read in the distance.

A melancholy dial tone, patience; she is truly there.
I hear the operator’s voice, sorry honey, a busy signal--
our human connection is twisted in the corded phone.

What once seemed a perfect balance, I hear, please try again.
Pay for who you talk to, leave behind regret and disappointment.
My past is trapped inside a phone booth of four transparent walls.

Standing solitary in a glass box of soaked emotion, phone
conversations carelessly coined and kissed, the plastic receiver is
feral in the ethereal night; the change clinks and time runs out.

Tuesday, September 6, 2011

WORDS FROM MY SOUL

Prayer is not asking. It is a longing of the soul. It is daily admission of one's weakness. It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without a heart.
Mohandas Gandhi


Words From My Soul

In the vast well of my heart,
tears fill arteries of
memories and upset.

In your sturdy way,
in weather tumultuous
you arrive and hold my heart.

I am beyond stirred
by the simple note
of your kind word,

they erupt inside me as
an effusion of emotions
swelling each stone.

You have helped me
forget and remember,
why my feet sink on this path,

and I feel your prayer fill me
and your blood lift me and
your heart nourish my unknowing,

as your tear of compassion
rolls down my cheek
and are absorbed in my heart.

Thursday, September 1, 2011

PHI IS A MYSTERIOUS NUMBER

I came across this mannequin's face in the AIDS Thrift Store in Center City and the plugged in faces seemed to scream questions from their lips directly to my sense of poetry, hence the creation of art in a controversial way. I feel a poem coming on!

Never mix your women. Charles Jerningham


Phi is a Mysterious Number

Fighting for the front forum
the cracking open has started.
Just throw the fedora to the past
and find a glimpse into the
reflection of the multiple personalities
living inside each individual’s head.
Her heads, inside of heads,
slipping inside of heads, all demanding
a certain measure of face value.

She was wearing veneer glasses
yesterday,
propped onto a undiscerning nose. She was
seeing external faces with an internal tone.
Faces creeping up the catacomb of neural cords
patiently waiting for the front view--
hoarding faces, fighting faces,
sexual kitten, Marilyn Monroe.

Does she crave
the golden ratio of the face
as her Barbie pink vision
melts into June Cleaver, a witch
doctor, a cat fight,
a prostitute of position,
a sot smeared firewoman,
the old maid, Mother Teresa,
Amelia Earhart, Tokyo Rose,
a trophy wife, a calendar pin-up,
a butch, a femme, a lesbian,
a tomboy, lady luck, a virginal
bride with white lace draped
over her face, a genderless soldier
dying in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Choosing her own set of smoky eyes,
based on the dominant life she is living,
the facade of faces tenaciously battle
the many women that inhabit her existence.
Which one will be her mask to rule?
Which one is the average face
of the American woman?