You Could Have Been a Love Song

I like how much you love me. I can see it in your eyes.
I like how protective you are, as if I am fragile and need your help.
I like how you think I am smart, how you laugh at everything I say.
I like how you respect me. My dreams are important and you care.
I like how different we are, and how it's okay that it should be that way.
I like how you tolerate my moods, rolling on the tide of emotion that is me.
I love how you fuck me like the dirty bitch I am.

To Quote Victoria Jackson at the SNL Reunion: What Happened to ME?

I am by nature a nurturer. I have always been so. I love doing for people, whatever is in my power to do.

But.

Sometimes, I get so tired of pretending to be a stable, almost stereotypical, Mom-type woman, I could scream. I love my house, yeah, I love my kids, yeah, I love to cook and sew and all that domestic shit, yeah, but what happened to ME? Somewhere in all this, I got lost. Or I lost part of me, or something. The me I am now isn't the real me.

What happened to the wild chick with mega-long blonde hair and eyes that could flash a glance that would make the Pope renounce celibacy? (and what happened to the guy who told me that, I wonder?) Where did my motorcycle go? And why don't my size 3 leather jeans fit any more?

I used to pin a bandanna to the circle of metal around my neck and then tie it in back and wear it in public.

I hate it that most of the people in my life now have no idea what I am really like.

I know what I used to think about older people when I would watch them go about their business, all boring and staid and unexciting and sadly without fun and how they must have always been that way, born that way, never any other way.

When I think that kids now are looking at me that same way I want to scream and shake them and say "Look, kid, when I was your age you wouldn't have been able to HANDLE ME!!"

And the truth is, they wouldn't have been able to handle me. Few could. Damn, I was good. I was wild.

The most exciting part of me, though, was that not many people suspected. I could turn it on or off, as the spirit moved me.

That on-off switch is still there. I know where it is. It's just that it's now off-limits in this life that somehow chose me, or maybe I chose it because I was afraid of something, but what? I don't know for sure.

But when your boyfriend of four wild and crazy years is diagnosed with terminal cancer and all hell is breaking loose all around you, sometimes, sometimes, you run away and do something so outlandishly NOT you that you stand back and watch it unfold like a stranger at a wedding, which is what I pretty much was at mine.

I have not been myself for many years. Lately, however, I have been juggling the possibility of shucking it all and being ME again.

Too bad I'm such a wad of chickenshit. . . .

Haiku #2

Some wishes really
shouldn't come true, but those are
the ones we want most.

Snap!

Waiting for the snap because, I thought, a snap would be all I’d sense; just a snap and then bright light, the roar of eternity steamrolling everything I am, was, will be. The snap and then nothing else for me to experience, not even a void. What’s left only that which you will experience, whoever you are, however you announce yourself to be. Whatever the snap was, you’ll see what it was right away.

Before the snap it’s cold and bitter, the taste of just apple peels and nothing else. Jammed up and entirely committed but still gentle with the soft palate, everything gets counted, considered, contained, a lifetime drawn on the back of a matchbook. A tremulous finger twitches where one last decision will be made. Everything ends where one thing says, “Fuck it.

As long as everyone else is doing it ....

Three things tattoo'd on me:
My contradictions guarding my kidneys;
some small reminder of who I am on
my left forearm (japanese "artistic"
when viewed properly)

Next time I go in,
I am getting two large dragons
on my torso,
and a pheonix on my neck
as reminders of my power.

Coffee, love and other instant gratifications

You could live here
(people do everyday, you know)
among the relics of age
and the weight of families
and pasts pressing
down the empty
spot on the bed
heavy like a lover
who's memories haunt dreams of the
future narrow
narrow and dark an alleyway
at 3 am some Saturday
night too drunk to
distinguish the echo
of your own steps from
those behind you.

What terrors await us
in our own minds!

A lapse of
judgement this looseness
of a shoelace could
you have ran back to old
vices or to some safety
net acrobat high in the
air dancing so close
to disaster the crowd
waits with bated breath
for the sweat on their
own palms to create
a slip peeking out
from under some woman's
skirt causes an involuntary
lust in the man behind
her as he holds a daughter
who must grow up with
the memory of her father's
failings, the sad man
the mother too close
to leaving love grown cold
and bitter.

Any child would cry
as if Santa is not real,
as if it matters, some deep
love festers after years
springs forth fresh as
that first moment, longing
stretches like cats across
vision langorious and
easy as apple pie
which of course is not
easy just simple as
counting to 10 during
hide and seek peeking
at 8 or 9 every child
cheats it's a wonder
we discourage the basic
desire to win some
we all lose some the
scars of our shortcomings
long and evident mindfully
we walk down broken
sidewalks each step carefully
observant of some private
and defunct religion
each breath a prayer
each beat praise
hurry through the
moment looking for
some kind of estatic
joy or wrong to right
but still we hurry past
each other as if we
were only one
the rest delusion and a
misunderstanding between
synapses in the brain
hallucinations are more
interesting to talk to at
night anyway.